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

“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 […]

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

“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, […]

“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.” […]

“The undisputed historical backdrop fro racial profiling is two hundred and forty years of chattel slavery, a hundred years of Jim Crow, and four-hundred-plus years of intergenerational wealth transfer during which most of the time black people not only owned little property but were property. In roughly fifty of the first seventy-two years of our […]

“The three great organized forces through which social hereditary operates are: The schools, the churches, and the public press. Any ideal that has the active co-operation of these three forces may, during the brief period of one generation, be forced upon the minds of the young so effectively that they cannot resist it.” -Napoleon Hill […]

“Go into the public squares of our cities and observe the monuments that have been erected to the leaders of war. Observe the posture of these statues as they stand as living symbols to glorify men who did nothing more than lead armies on escapades of destruction. Notice how well these statues of warriors, mounted […]

“In my city, the brown fields and rotting piers and rusting factories are testament to an economy that shifted and then shifted again, rendering obsolete whole generations of union-wage workers and their families. The cost to society is beyond calculation, not that anyone ever paused to calculate anything. Our economic and political leaders are dismissive […]

“At worst, our cities- or those places in our cities where most of us fear to tread- are vessels for the darkest contradictions and most brutal competitions that underlie the way we actually live together, or fail to live together.” -David Simon Tweet