“[America practices] socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.” -Martin Luther King Jr.

“The 1800s in America was a time when a few ruthless individuals gained most of the country’s wealth. Banker J.P. Morgan once refused a loan to the U.S. government because, he said, it lacked collateral. Cleveland’s John D. Rockefeller began his business career as an accountant, heading a firm that investigates the potential of oil investments. He told his own employees there was no future in oil, then wholeheartedly invested in the natural resource himself.” -From, “Indian Summer” By: Brian McDonald

“Ours is a society in which the actor is more important than the real-life hero the actor portrays.” -Randall Robinson

“As he ran my papers, I was reminded of the armed white men, dubbed ‘pattie rollers’ by African Americans, who were deployed throughout the South to patrol and prevent slave rebellions. These patrols, which white men in the South were required to serve in, operated exclusively at night, traveling on horseback from plantation to plantation, harassing black people, looking for contraband (weapons, liquor, books, etc.) that might indicate a plan to flee. Pattie rollers were instructed to lash viciously any enslaved African without a written pass. In North Carolina, a law ordered pattie rollers to whip on the spot any “loose, disorderly, or suspected person” found among enslaved Africans. It was from these pattie rollers, funded by local taxes, that many modern policing concepts were derived. For example, pattie rollers, like modern police, referred to patrollers’ designated areas of operation as ‘beats.’” -M.K. Asante

“Find out just what people will submit to and you have found the exact amount of injustice and wrong, which will be imposed upon them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” -Frederick Douglass