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.

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.

I think hopelessness is the enemy of justice.

Because my great-grandparents were enslaved people, the legacy of slavery was something that didn't seem impersonal or disconnected. That's what motivated me to get into law.

Are you the sum total of your worst acts?

That's what's provocative to me - that we can victimize people, we can torture and traumatize people with no consciousness that it is a shameful thing to do.

I think there is a contempt for the human dignity of people who were enslaved. You couldn't see them as fully human and so you didn't respect their desire to be connected to a family and a place. That was the only way you could tolerate and make sense of lynching and the terror that lynching represented.