Cynthia McKinney Quotes

'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?

Some white Milwakeeans still referred to the North side as 'the cire', as they did in the 1960s, and if they ventured into it, they saw street after street of sagging duplexes, fading murals, twenty-four hour daycares, and corner stores with 'WIC Accepted Here' signs.

There's not a lot of hope coming from the inner city.

You see, I was born in the slums, that was before the ghetto. The ghetto was kind of refined; the slums was right there on the ground.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

American society as a whole can never achieve the outer-reaches of potential, so long as it tolerates the inner cities of despair.

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

I have no interest in romanticizing poor black people, having been one of them myself in our beloved hometown of Detroit.

I believe the way I describe the problems in Chicago is that it's a metropolitan area. I've said that everywhere. The uneducated child is not just my problem, it's the state's problem. It's also the federal government's problem.

Poverty and lack of education are ruining our planet.

Now we just showin' and provin' that there's a ghetto everywhere you go.

Faced with the way the system does you in the 'hood sometimes, if you don't literally get out, your chances are slim. You'll definitely die mentally. You'll pretty much die physically.

You leap over the wall of one ghetto and find yourself in another ghetto.

I didn't say I wouldn't go into ghetto areas. I've been in many of them and to some extent I would say this; if you've seen one city slum, you've seen them all.

Corporate America cannot afford to remain silent or passive about the downward spiral we are undergoing. It cannot turn a blind eye to how difficult the experience of life is for so many of their customers.

Racial injustice, war, urban blight, and environmental rape have a common denominator in our exploitative economic system.

If you've seen one city slum you've seen them all.

Yet today our splendid theory of government is confronted by a great peril. We have become blind to evils that menace us. We are confronted with glutted markets and idle labor. It is a condition that makes it possible for a few men to become landlords of a proud city like this while God's poor are packed in the slums. Such a condition is not only a menace to Republican institutions, but a travesty upon the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

This country has so much wealth and so much poverty, and that seemed wrong to me. 'Evicted' was my Ph.D. dissertation.

Mom came from what has been called the poorest place in America - Lake Providence, Louisiana. She was born on the south side of the Mississippi which was mainly African American and even poorer than the rest.

Can we imagine anything much more viciously sadistic than the Black Ghetto mother?

We must acknowledge that issues like systemic racism, economic inequality, and the achievement gap are the result of manmade policies.

When you go to places like Gary and Detroit, you see the economic problem in this country and who it's really affecting.

I was in Vancouver, and I was in what I was told was the poorest neighborhood in North America - which I find very hard to believe because has anyone here ever been to Detroit?