Walshy Fire Quotes

When I hear stories about the number of kids that have been lost to violence, where families grow up teaching kids 'duck and cover' long before they learn their ABC's or their colors, I know there is something profoundly wrong in our city.

Sometimes I do feel hopeless when I look out and scream out through my music, and I scream out through these interviews, and I scream out to people to kind of get their attention back on the things that are meaningful. There's people dying on the streets of Chicago - young people, young men and women who are losing their lives.

New Orleans is a great place, a place of celebration. But on the other hand, there's a reality to it, there's violence, there's misguided youth.

There's a lot of potential that goes unused in places like South Central L.A., a lot of brilliant, smart people who just don't have that chance to show it.

South Central is just who I am. Even though I have a nice house, nice family, the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins, my brothers, my sisters, they don't wanna move out.

When you are raised, as John Edwards was, in a small town like Robbins, North Carolina, you get to understand poverty and unemployment, or inadequate health care, first-hand by seeing the daily struggles of your friends and neighbors.

The drug war is causing crime. It is just chewing up young, Black men. And it is killing Newark.

Those inner-cities, they're not giving kids a chance. They're not giving the teachers a chance to really help those kids. They're making it real tough. You're either gonna help or you're hurting your own country.

How does one endure in a place they shouldn't be condemned to live in? You could take that same question and apply it to any number of neighborhoods in any number of cities.

Reagan's neglect of the inner city is responsible for hiphop. Hiphop is created thanks to the conditions that crack set: easy money but a lot of work, the violence involved, the stories it produced. Crack helped birth hiphop.

Whether the people in Haiti, the young kids in Chicago that [are] going through violence, or whether you're in Atlanta or L.A. or Europe - it's not even color barriers for me - I go to where I know there's a lot of turmoil and pain.

I'll tell you what, our inner cities are so, so bad right now. The danger, the crime, the lack of education, no jobs. African Americans are living in hell in our - in the inner cities. I mean, they're living - they're living in hell. You walk to the store for a loaf of bread; you get shot.

Everybody does good things, but I'm talking about making major changes in the educational system that would impact an entire race. I'm talking about stopping these young gang members from killing one another. I'm talking about keeping prisons from overflowing.

I grew up in the 'hood around prostitutes, drug dealers, killers, and gangbangers, but I also grew up juxtaposed: On the doorknob outside of our apartment, there was blood from some guy who got shot; but inside, there was National Geographic magazines and encyclopedias and a little library bookshelf situation.

Knife crime and gun crime is poverty-driven, and poverty leads to insecurity.

Growing up in New Orleans and just being in a poverty-stricken neighborhood gave me that same fire that Eazy had to separate himself from what could have ended up being such a bad situation.

'Death at an Early Age' was about racial segregation in Boston. 'Illiterate America' was about grownups who can't read. 'Rachel and Her Children' was about people who were homeless in the middle of Manhattan.

It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto anymore, but every time I go back, I'm still seeing the same things that I lived.

I'll be in 'The Get Down' from the creator Baz Luhrmann, and it takes place in the '70s with South Bronx kids growing up at the rise of hip-hop and really when the city was at its financial worst. It's about teens struggling with violence, drugs and gangs and trying to find solace in music and all that good stuff.

Those of us who have been economically successful cannot forget those who have not.

We can either allow our youth to shoot baskets or watch them shoot people.

The slums will be but a memory.

You’ve got a reputation and it stinks….Since Detroit is more than 80 percent Black, it can’t be the white man’s fault. It’s not what he’s doing to you. It’s what you’re not doing.

I learned a lot about the law at Harvard Law School, but no one taught me about why a 20-year old black male in a tough neighborhood feels like he needs to be armed. Nobody taught me about what attracts kids to join gangs.... It is difficult to stand in judgment of other human beings without understanding human beings.

I do remember the numbers runners, I do remember the poverty and bread lines. Harlem stays with you forever.