It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips - these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?

Agitators, organizers, activists, intellectuals aren't bound by those rules. We're not trying to figure out, how do I thread this particular needle?

I don't think of myself as a particularly nostalgic person.

Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I've never considered it a neutral or passive profession.

Well, first of all I think that we have to be careful with terms like the working class, obviously. When [Karl] Marx wrote about the working class he was writing about something much more bounded than we're talking about.

Every revolution seems impossible at the beginning, and after it happens, it was inevitable.

I was a kid and I studied when I had to [live].