“Civil marriage, like all civil rights provided by the government, must be provided equally to all Americans.”

The beauty of being black in American society is that black has always been an inclusive definition.

Growing up as a black kid with a white father who loves you, who affirms you, who was part of your life is fundamentally different than what black people in my family were subjected to in the 19th century or the 18th century. But unfortunately, it doesn’t change the old racial order.

I train my kids to dream really big and impossible dreams and to pursue them doggedly.

You’ve got to make sure that people have the opportunity to work at a good job, they have access to good healthcare, and that they have the opportunity to build wealth over time.

The U.S. Constitution contains no right for a child to go to school, let alone for a child to go to a good school. And yet, we know that if they don’t go to a good school, they’re less likely to be able to realize all that this country has to offer.

I think we need to let the old racial order just stay where it is and not seek to improve upon it. Not try to create more racial categories, because all that does is it makes a race stick around longer.

In order to bring down the incarceration rate, you’ve got to start with the beginning of life. You’ve got to make sure that parents and schools are prepared to prepare young people for success. You’ve got to deal with the next stage of life.

No person can maximize the American Dream on the minimum wage.

I was raised in a family where we were taught that the best thing you could do with your life was to really kind of push the cause of progress and justice and human rights forward.

Let us invest less and less in war and tax cuts for the richest 1 percent, and more and more in jobs and schools for the other 99 percent.

White has always been an exclusive definition. I think one of the challenges for white people is to figure out how to have a more inclusive picture of who their families are, of who they are.

The right to vote is the right upon which all of our rights are leveraged – and without which none can be protected.

When somebody says the best thing you can do is be tough, the best thing you can do is use your brute force, then we’re selling ourselves short.

As an American people, what is greatest about our history are the many times we have led this world away from hate, towards hope.

It misdirects crucial resources and undercuts the trust needed between law enforcement and the communities they serve. It has no place in our national discourse, and no place in our nation’s police departments.

It’s a funny thing, in the US we all believe that we have a right to go to school. We have a right to a good education. And we don’t.

Give a civil servant a good case and he’ll wreck it with clichés, bad punctuation, double negatives, and convoluted apology.

These latter institutions [the civil service, trade unions, media of all kinds], notably of course television.

A war of words escalated between the president-elect and a civil rights icon.

I got interested in politics during the civil rights movement and then Vietnam.

The United States, per capita, at a certain period in its history, had the most junkies of any country ever in the world – right after the Civil War.

I like the liberal tradition; I like the Hubert Humphrey tradition fighting for civil rights.

The civil rights movement was very important in my house, and then Vietnam was very important ’cause there were two boys, so I came of age during a very heated political climate.

Rosa Parks was primed, she had the Civil Rights Movement behind her, she didn’t just decide to sit on the bus, it was strategic.