We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul. You tried that in the case of the Negro. You pressed him down for two centuries; and in so doing you crippled the moral strength and paralyzed the spiritual energies of the white men of the country. When the hands of the black were fettered, white men were deprived of the liberty of speech and the freedom of the press. Society cannot afford to neglect the enlightenment of any class of its members.
Images from my visits to the Center for Civil and Human Rights in Atlanta, GA in 2016 and my last visit to Washington, DC in 2017 when I finally went to see the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial.
This instinct to humiliate, when it’s modeled by someone on a public platform, someone powerful, it filters down into society. It kinda gives permission for others to do the same thing.
Disrespect invites disrespect. Violence incites violence. When the powerful uses their position to abuse others, we all lose.
~ Meryl Streep, 2017 Golden Golds acceptance speech
An attack on law enforcement is an attack on America…. I will restore law and order to our country. This administration has failed the inner city. It’s failed them on every level….To mske life safe for all our citizens we are going to defeat the barbarians of ISIS and we are going to defeat them […]
A series of portraits and signs carried in marches and rallies protesting police brutality. The images were taken in New York City and Baltimore between 2014-2015. Click here to purchase any of the below prints. Click here to purchase any of the above prints.
Life. Witnessing the wanton destruction of life has deeply impacted me these last few years. Every life I’ve witnessed killed on a video…every life I’ve heard was destroyed… everyone who has their right to life taken from them by someone who believed their right to kill trumped another’s right to live…all of those lives have changed me. People […]
On Sunday, June 26, Jesse Williams won the 2016 BET Humanitarian Award. He gave a powerful acceptance speech that is an on-point statement highlighting racial inequality in America today. It’s ironic that is was given before a room full of entertainers, one of which was posturing with pointing to the brand on his shirt right before Jesse called out the culture of selling ourselves for brands when we prayed and worked for centuries to escape being branded.
“This award is not for me. This is for the real organizers across the country: the activists, the civil rights attorneys, the struggling parents, the families, the teachers, the students that are realizing that a system built to divide and impoverish and destroy us cannot stand if we do. Right? It’s kind of basic mathematics. The more we learn about who we are and how we got here, the more we will mobilize.”
“There has been no war that we have not fought and died on the front lines of. There’s no job we haven’t done. There’s no tax they haven’t levied against us. And we’ve paid all of them. But freedom is somehow always conditional here. You’re free – they keep telling us. But… she…she would have been alive had she not acted so… free. Freedom is always coming in the hereafter. But, you know what though? The hereafter is a hustle. We want it now.”
“The burden of the brutalized is not to comfort the bystander. That’s not our job. Stop with all that. If you have a critique for the resistance… for our resistance, then you better have an establish record of critique of our oppression. If you have no interest in equal rights for Black people, then do not make suggestions to those who do. Sit down.”
“The thing is though, just because we’re magic doesn’t mean we’re not real.”
Les mortels sont égaux; ce n’est pas la naissance, C’est la seule vertu qui fait la différence. All mortals are equal; it is not their birth, But virtue itself that makes the difference. Voltaire, Eriphile, act II, scene I (1732); these lines were also used in Mahomet, act I, scene IV (1741)
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