Many states can no longer afford to support public education, public benefits, public services without doing something about the exorbitant costs that mass incarceration have created.

When I stepped into this world, I saw that we were all burdened by a certain kind of indifference to the plight of poor people. We were burdened by an insensitivity to a legacy of racial bias. We were tolerating unfairness and unreliability in a way that burdened me and provoked me.

The opposite of poverty is not wealth. I don't believe that. I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice.

I'm persuaded that if most people saw what I see on a regular basis, they would want change.

In a landscape littered with all of this imagery about the nobility of the Civil War and the Confederate effort and struggle, the absence of markers says something really powerful.

The landscape in Montgomery and in the South is just saturated with imagery. Markers are everywhere. There's a marker for the first Confederate post office, there's a marker for a ball that Robert E. Lee hosted, there's a marker for where Jefferson Davis had a meeting. We love reminding people about all that was going on in the mid-nineteenth century.

I say this thing about how I've never had to say my head is bloodied but not bowed, like everybody who came before me had to say. And that tells me that I can do a lot more than I think I can.