I talk about my grandmother a lot, because she's an amazing person - not in some dramatic, distinct, unique way, but anybody who is the daughter of enslaved people and who has found a way to be hopeful and create love and value justice and seek peace is a remarkable person.

If you're just the person with power, exercising that power fearfully and angrily, you're going to be an operative of injustice and inequality.

Montgomery's unique role in the domestic slave trade was that it was the first community that had a rail line that connected the Deep South to the mid-Atlantic region.

The greatest evil of American slavery was not involuntary servitude but rather the narrative of racial differences we created to legitimate slavery. Because we never dealt with that evil, I don't think slavery ended in 1865, it just evolved.

I have to get comfortable with resistance, and even sometimes with hostility.

If you love your community, then you need to be insisting on justice in all circumstances.

Finally I got to the point where I said, I'd like to start a project where we can actually talk about race and poverty, not through the lens of a particular case, but much more broadly.