I think the big turning moment was when I joined the student political action club and started studying nonviolent civil disobedience in response to the Iraq War. The first anti-Bush protest in Atlanta was the first protest that I'd ever been to, and I helped organize the school walkout when I was a junior. It was a really solidifying moment.
Cecily McMillanI had a sense that my mother was struggling, when I was a kid, working twelve hour days, making $12,000 a year with two kids in a trailer park.
Cecily McMillanI think that by telling the truth and by attempting to be a good citizen, somehow I've ended up playing with fire. And that's really scary.
Cecily McMillanI think any person who goes to Rikers is criminalized, even just for visiting. I go back every week to see my friends in there. When you go to see a criminal, you are by relation a criminal and subject to be treated like one.
Cecily McMillanJail is just another micro-society. It just happens that here, the problems are far more out in the open, we don't live with the facades of lies that democracy or capitalism creates for us.
Cecily McMillan