Women Activists From The United States

"With punishment at the center of everything we haven't been able to really address the other stuff that needs to happen. Because people fucking need to-they need to take accountability when they harm people."

"Remember, the systems live within us (referring to the words of Morgan Bassichis). The punishment mindset is very hard to get out of. And it's normal and healthy often to want vengeance against people for causing you great harm. That's not going to get addressed in an accountability process. If you are the one who is rushing after that and that's really what you're seeking, an accountability process really would not help. You're always going to be feeling as though it's "not working" because it's not doing the thing that you really would like."

"Some people may ask, "Does this mean that I can never call the cops if my life is in serious danger?" Abolition does not center that question. Instead, abolition challenges us to ask "Why do we have no other well-resourced options?" and pushes us to creatively consider how we can grow, build, and try other avenues to reduce harm. Repeated attempts to improve the sole option offered by the state, despite how consistently corrupt and injurious it has proven itself, will neither reduce nor address the harm that actually required the call. We need more and effective options for the greatest number of people."

"Let's begin our abolitionist journey not with the question "What do we have now, and how can we make it better?" Instead, let's ask, "What can we imagine for ourselves and the world?" If we do that, then boundless possibilities of a more just world await us."

"I was struck again by the importance of language and of words that need to be spoken. Our best teachers, including Audre Lorde among others, have imparted this truth. In the last few months, weeks, and days, I have found myself saying #BlackLivesMatter out loud at various times. It's not that I don't already know that they do. I think that I am trying to speak the words into existence. These words should be taken for granted. They are not. I've revised my previous belief that the words should remain unspoken. "Who are they trying to convince?" I'd previously confided to a friend. It turns out that I owe a debt of gratitude to Opal, Patrisse, and Alicia for reminding me of the power of language and the spoken word."

"I have so many touchstones. I believe in touchstones, people you go back to in particular moments when you need something. I turn to Baldwin a lot. I read him when I'm feeling a sense of despair over the world that I'm in. I find a sentence that he wrote and it's like, "Ooh, yes." I think about so many of the Black communist and socialist women of the first part of the century. If they could go through what they went through, if Marvel Cooke could survive the Red Scare and being fired by the Amsterdam News-she was the first woman working there ever-if she can endure that in the 1930s, what am I doing? You know what I mean? Now I have so much more at my disposal. I'm so much less oppressed. I love Ida B. Wells-Barnett. I love reading her journal where she's lamenting that she can't stop spending money, like, "Why did I buy that scarf? My God. Why am I spending this money?" And it's beautiful, because it shows you this woman who fearlessly went to the South by herself to literally take down people's testimony after a lynching, just sitting around saying, "Why can't I fucking stop shopping? Why did I buy this super expensive scarf that I cannot afford?" It makes me so happy to go back to that and read that passage and be like, "Yes, Ida!"...Angela Davis is a huge touchstone for me. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore is a touchstone for me. Beth Richie is a touchstone for me. A lot of Black feminist women who I've been able to be in space with in real life. Some who've given me a way of being in the world."

"June Jordan, who has been a touchstone of mine, really, since I first read her work in college, which was many, many years ago. So I really can't believe that I'm here today, and I'm really grateful to be here with all of you to celebrate her legacy and her life. June Jordan loved Black people, and so do I. She was an educator, and so am I. She was an activist; so am I. She was an internationalist, and so am I. She was a brilliant writer, and I am not-at all...She insisted that by organizing, we have the power to overcome oppression. I too believe this to be true."

"I think we’re going to have to be much more creative in the way that we address issues. I tend to be skeptical of gun control, in general. I see it often as a way to criminalize communities of color further."

"I have been thinking a lot about #MeToo and thinking, What if we look at it as something that is not done to "bad people?" What if it is actually a way to understand the ways that various forms of violence actually shape our lives? If we could see it as a way to understand how deeply enmeshed we are in the very systems that we're organizing to transform, then I feel like it's a movement that will allow us to move a step toward transformation and more justice."

"The fact that sexual violence is so incredibly pervasive should tell us that it's not a story of individual monsters. We have got to think about this in a more complex way if we're really going to uproot forms of sexual violence."

"How do we mourn? How can we grieve? I think poetry opens a door. Poetry helps us to resist."

"Poetry can help lift the ceiling from our brains so that we can imagine liberation."

"Often, the home is a practice ground often for the violence that then becomes public violence. We really do take—you know, tend to minimize private violence and focus on the spectacular examples of public violence. But if we don’t address that private violence, then we are going to continue to see public violence in the ways that we have."

"Poetry helps me to imagine freedom."

"I think part of what we have to talk about is the fact that one of the main tricks, I think, of white supremacy is that it invisiblizes both kind of structures of violence and tries to focus mostly on individual forms of violence, right? So that when we see a situation where, for the most part, the people who are doing these mass killings are mostly young white men, the story gets told that that is a form of violence that’s kind of an acceptable, normal form of violence. When people of color and others commit forms of violence, we are told and taught to see that as somehow outside of the norm of general kinds of violence, and we tend to catastrophize that. And then that also leads to certain kinds of policy responses that are intended to actually continue to oppress the groups that are very much already targeted and oppressed. So, I think that that is a big aspect of this that we have to look at, that you can’t look at these mass shootings without understanding also the ways in which violence is the glue that holds forms of oppression in place. And one of those forms of oppression is white supremacist kinds of forms of violence and oppression."

"Black Americans are residents of a settler colony, not truly citizens of the United States. Despite a constitution laden with European Enlightenment values and a document of independence declaring certain inalienable rights, Black existence was legally that of private property until postbellum emancipation. The Black American condition today is an evolved condition directly connected to this history of slavery, and that will continue to be the case as long as the United States remains as an ongoing settler project. Nothing short of a complete dismantling of the American state as it presently exists can or will disrupt this."

"I think one of the most important parts about mutual aid has to do with changing the social relationships that we have amongst each other, in order to be able to fight beyond this current moment, beyond the current crisis, beyond the current form of a disaster that we’re trying to overcome. And so, one of the beautiful aspects is that you really don’t know where the connections are going to take you. You’re going to make and build new relationships that will kind of lead to new projects and will lead to new understandings, that will shape the potential future of, you know, your community and beyond."

"This is not a humiliating experience. This is not a humiliating experience."

"My goal every day was to free Olympia to do the things that only she could do. These included memorizing her lines, going for a costume fitting and working out with her yoga instructor. I did everything else and I did it for 25 years."

"It took my family a long time to realize that something was wrong. My brother and I were in complete denial; we loved our mother so much and we didn’t want to admit that her health was deteriorating."

"You know sometimes when you act, you work through some things as if you would in a therapy session."

"Whatever this thing is that takes over you, that says that you are worthless, that really the only answer is to kill yourself, is so much more powerful that that's... the calling you relate to."

"That’s not the way it’s supposed to be. But then, things often don’t turn out the way you plan."

"I’ve had trouble sleeping for a good part of my life, And what I would always do is start at the very beginning of ‘The Miracle Worker’ and say all of the lines, all the way through."

"Such a man was Livingstone, not afraid to be meek in order to be great; not afraid to “fear God and work bard;” not ashamed to stoop in order that he might raise others to his high estate. He gave the world a continent and a conscience; with the lavishness almost of Nature herself he bestowed cataracts and rivers, lakes and mountains, forests and valleys, upon his native land. He stirred the soul of the civilized world to the atrocities of the slave trade, and he made it realize that humanity may be found even in the breast of a savage. When he laid down his life in the forest he loved, he laid upon the altar of humanity and science the costliest and sweetest sacrifice that it had known for many a weary age."

"The life of service; the life of unselfish giving — this must Livingstone’s life mean to us. Unselfish, ungrudging lavishing of life and soul, even to the last drop of heart’s blood. Service that does not hesitate because the task seems small, or the waiting weary; service that does not fear to be of no account in the eyes of the world. Truly, indeed, might Wordsworth’s apostrophe to Milton be ascribed to him: “Thy soul was like a star and dwelt apart;/Thou hadst a voice whose sound was like the sea;/Pure as the naked heavens, majestic, free,/So didst thou travel on life’s common way/In cheerful godliness, and yet thy heart/The lowliest duties on itself did lay.”"

"I always felt pressure as a child to perform, but again that came from the people who were managing my career. There was no such thing as halfway, I had to do it to the hilt."

"All that hitting out and pulling and tugging every performance for two years was probably a kind of therapy for me, a release. Otherwise, who knows what would have happened to me if I adjust had to hold it all in."

"There was so much suffering, She really, really suffered in a way that — we were desperate to help relieve her suffering, and so it's just a blessing that she's not suffering anymore."

"Dear to his heart was Lincoln, the Emancipator, an ideal hero whom he consistently revered. Away to the southwest from Kamolondo is a large lake which discharges its waters by the important river, Lomami, into the great Lualaba. To this lake, known as the Chobungo by the natives, Dr. Livingstone gave the name of Lincoln, in memory of him for whom your noble institution was named. This was done because of a vivid impression produced on his mind by hearing a portion of Lincoln’s inauguration speech from an English pulpit, which related to the causes that induced him to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. To the memory of the man whom Livingstone revered he has contributed a monument more durable than brass or stone."

"One idea mastered him — to give Africa to the world."

"who knew and understood them as human beings, and not as beasts, the slavery trade was, as he expressed it, “the open sore of Africa.” Over and again he voiced his belief that the Negro freeman was a hundred time more valuable than the slave. He repeatedly enjoined those who had the fitting out of his expeditions not to send him slaves to accompany him on his journeys, but freemen, as they were more trustworthy. He voiced the fundamental truth that he who is his own master is he who obeys and believes in his master. The slave trade in Africa was dealt its death-blow by Dr. Livingstone."

"I wrote the book not to have a catharsis, because I was under the impression that I already have had many catharses as one could have."

"Hamilton Wright Mabie says that the question for each man to settle is not what he would do if he had means, time, influence, and educational advantages, but what he will do with the things he has. In all history there are few men who have answered this question. Among them none have answered it more effectively than he whom we have gathered to honor to-night — David Livingstone. The term “social service,” which is on every one’s lips now, was as yet uncoined when David Livingstone was born. But it was none the less true, that without overmuch prating of the ideal which is held up to the man of to-day as the only one worth striving for, the sturdy pioneers of Livingstone’s day and ilk realized to the highest the ideal of man’s duty to his fellow-man."

"To you, of the younger generation, what a marvel, what a world of meaning in those words — “I have been taught patience.” We, who fret and chafe because the whole world will not bend its will to our puny strivings, and turn its whole course that we might have our unripe desires fulfilled, should read and re-read of the man who could wait, because he knew that time and all eternity would be bent to meet his desires in time."

"I think maybe the most important part of her legacy is her acting. Above and beyond anything, the reason any of the other stuff is possible in terms of the scope of the impact that she was able to have with people was her talent and her work and her work ethic, her discipline. She worked extremely hard."

"“Help This Great President stand firm, Mark!!!...You are the leader, with him, who is standing for America’s constitutional governance at the precipice. The majority knows Biden and the Left is attempting the greatest Heist of our History.”"

"Every school boy in the nation knows Abraham Lincoln — his gaunt figure, his seamed and pain lined face, with its sweetness and patience, are familiar to their eyes. His life, with its romance of poverty and toil, its tragic sorrow and tragic end, are as close to the heart of the nation as the stories of the Bible and the Christ-child. The utterances of Lincoln, the anecdotes of his life, the whimsical stories of his early days and his quaint humor furnish a never ending theme of interest to the American school boy. His sublime speeches; the delicate pathos of his first inaugural address; the splendid, stern, yet tender beauty of the second inaugural address are recited from thousands of school platforms annual, while the Gettysburg speech is as well known in America as the Lord’s Prayer and the Beatitudes, and I deem it no sacrilege to say that in point of literary beauty it stands with them. It is graven in bronze in the national cemeteries, on school walls, in the halls of colleges and universities. It is recited semi-annually by the majority of the school boys in the country, and it is right that it should be, for is not Lincoln the nation’s idol, the American ideal?"

"Yet how many Negro youths in the land know as much of the ideal of Negro manhood, Frederick Douglass? If Lincoln is the American idol, so is Douglass the Negro’s idol. If Lincoln’s was a romance of life, with its toilsome youth culminating in a splendid manhood, attaining the highest gift which the nation could be stow, how much more is Douglass’ life a romance? The slave, beaten, starved, stripped, fleeing from slavery at the most deadly peril, to become in his later manhood the guest of nobles and kings, the cynosure of the nation’s eyes, the friend of this same Lincoln, the great man of the century? If Lincoln’s utterances are inspiring, calling in clarion notes for right and justice and truth, so much more are Douglass’ inspiring to us, calling for manhood and strength and power. For he was no soft-tongued apologist,/He spoke straightforward, fearlessly, uncowed;/The sunlight of his truth dispelled the mist,/And set in bold relief each dark-hued cloud;/To sin and crime he gave their proper hue,/And hurled at evil what was evil’s due."

"The Negro youth of the land recites the Gettysburg speech, and it is right that he should do so; but does he know Douglass’ “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” The Negro youth of the land admires Lincoln’s Second Inaugural address, but does he know Douglass’ splendid tribute to the man who wrote the Second Inaugural address, when the freedmen of this country erected the Lincoln monument at Washington? The Negro youth rolls over his tongue the witty epigrams of the mighty Lincoln, but has he been made familiar with some of the pithy aphorisms of his own Douglass?"

"It is eminently fitting and proper that we, as Americans, celebrate the birth of the man who, by a single stroke of his pen — albeit, a reluctant stroke — gave the Negro the right to stand with his face to the sun and proclaim to the world, “I am a man!” It is our right and our duty to commemorate his birth, to mourn his death, to revere the twelfth of February as a holiday, to come together to lay laurel wreaths on his tomb. But we Americans of the darker skin have another day as dear to us as the twelfth of February, less well known, perhaps, but which we should acclaim with shouts of joy, even as we acclaim the day which has grown familiar by long usage. That day is the birthday of Frederick Douglass. Lincoln and Douglass; Douglass and Lincoln! Names ever linked in history and in the hearts of a grateful race as the two great emancipators, the two men above all other Americans, fearless, true, brave, strong, the western ideal of manhood. Is it not fitting that their natal days should come within a few hours of each other. Is it not right that when the Negro child lifts its eyes to the American flag on Lincoln’s day e should, at the same time, think of the man whose thunderous voice never ceased in its denunciation of wrong, its acclamation of right, its spurring the immortal Lincoln to be true to his highest ideals; its sorrowful wail when he seemed to fail the nation? Verily, on this day of days we of the darker hued skin have a richer heritage than our white brothers — ours the proud possession of two heroes, theirs of but one. . . ."

"Frederick Douglass once said: Any man may say things that are true of Abraham Lincoln, but no man can say anything that is new of Abraham Lincoln. If that were true in the past century, in the early seventies, how much more is it true today"

"Abraham Lincoln does not need the tribute we give him today; the world is paying him tributes greater than ours, more glorious and resounding. But the sweeter praise which we pay him is that of a race, profiting by the lesson of a life. Fame has written Lincoln’s name with the greatest men of the world with the statesmen, with the wisest of monarchs, with the prince of republicans — and placed his laurel wreath higher than the rest. But it remains for the descendants of slaves to give him what no man in history has ever had — the divine breath of gratitude, the determination to make the world see, centuries hence, that he was not mistaken in his greatest deed, his life work, his martyrdom."

"But Frederick Douglass, whom we honor equally, has not yet had the full meed of his praise, and we celebrate the passing of his natal day with a finer appreciation of what he has done for us, and of what his life will mean, not only to the men who were his contemporaries, nor yet to us of a later generation, but to the race of the future; to the children yet unborn. History has not yet given him his rightful place on its pages, but the history of. tomorrow will place him where he should be — with the courageous, the wise, the far-seeing. It remains for us, his own people, to pour out at his altar the incense he deserves, the praise he merits; to let his life be a beacon to light us to that higher, truer patriotism — the fearlessness of real manhood."

"Lincoln and Douglass; Douglass and Lincoln! May their names ever be welded into one memory in the hearts of every Negro in the land!"

"Critics were surprised that I was convincing as the southern Clarey in Steel Magnolias. The bias is still there but not as much."

"I really enjoy that sort of exploration in a community of people. That's what I really like. All those people come, and sit together, and then we all go through this experience, and some aspect of our humanity is touched."

"It is hard. And as you get older it's harder. Not to do the work, that's not the frustrating part. What's hard is raising the money, building the board, staying abreast of the current things that are happening that want to sabotage and submerge you."

"Because now I am a grandmother, and I love it. It's like a free ride. Your kids are doing all the worrying, and scrambling. Children and grandchildren can make you really happy. You walk in the room and there is like a glow. I often think about how fortunate we are as a family."

"I believe that in the theater you really can't do anything that doesn't have some political consequence. My work has been about finding my own voice and a way to express myself."