If you love your country, then you need to be thinking a lot more critically about what justice.

Embracing a certain quotient of racial bias and discrimination against the poor is an inexorable aspect of supporting capital punishment. This is an immoral condition that makes rejecting the death penalty on moral grounds not only defensible but necessary for those who refuse to accept unequal or unjust administration of punishment.

We have a system of justice in [the US] that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes.

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.

We all have a responsibility to create a just society

If we want to be proud of our country, if we want to be proud as Americans, if we want to be proud of our history, then we can't talk about the things that are inconsistent with pride, about which we can have no pride.

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.