Stacey Abrams Quotes

God blessed us with all this money, so why not take the money and put it into my brother's case? Talk about social and racial injustice in our country, and mass incarceration in our country?

Dwayne Betts is the kind of man who should be receiving awards from the Connecticut bar. Instead, he hasn't been admitted.

Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.

I'd like to continue being involved with issues that animated my time as attorney general - criminal-justice reform and civil rights especially. I don't just want to give speeches; I'd like to involve myself in this work in a systematic way.

We have fought for social justice. We have fought for economic justice. We have fought for environmental justice. We have fought for criminal justice. Now we must add a new fight - the fight for electoral justice.

The worst an ex-con is likely to do if given the right to vote is vote for a Democrat.

It is tragic that people who are incarcerated are unable to vote. They are probably the most important voices to listen to because they can tell us what we need to change.

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

While there is a lower class, I am in it. While there is a criminal element, I am of it. And while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

Citizens will be disenfranchised by the law instead of served by it, and that historical progress toward a more perfect union will go backwards instead of forward.

The great majority of negroes in the South who do not vote, do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could.

The criminal justice system is not working and people want something that works.

How can you stand for the national anthem of a nation that preaches and propagates, 'freedom and justice for all,' that is so unjust to so many of the people living there?

Civil rights leaders, including my husband and Albert Turner, have fought long and hard to achieve free and unfettered access to the ballot box. Mr. Sessions has used the awesome power of his office to chill the free exercise of the vote by black citizens in the district he now seeks to serve as a federal judge.

Just as incarceration has come to define the lives of low-income black men, eviction is defining the lives of low-income black women.

Does being practical mean we prop up a legal system that's unfair, that bears its weight down on black men and black women, and by extension if you are Hispanic or indigenous or poor? Does being practical mean you don't say to the American people you deserve better than you're getting? That's not the practical we want.

Too many people fought too hard to make sure all citizens of all colors, races, ethnicities, genders, and abilities can vote to think that not voting somehow sends a message.

During the Jim Crow era, poll taxes and literacy tests kept the African-Americans from polls. But today, felon disenfranchisement laws accomplished what poll taxes and literacy tests ultimately could not, because those laws were struck down. But felony disenfranchisement laws had been allowed to stand.

The very rights that we supposedly won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist for those labeled felons. That's why I say we have not ended racial caste in America; we've merely redesigned it.

Mass incarceration is a massive system of racial and social control.

Restoring the rights of individuals who have served their time and reentered society is the right thing to do. Virginia's felon disenfranchisement policy is rooted in a tragic history of voter suppression and marginalization of minorities, and it needs to be overturned.

If there is any hope that we in America might one day overcome our own history of genocide, slavery, discrimination, and oppression and create a justice system that is truly a source of international pride rather than shame, I suspect Rwanda may have as much to teach us about what is required as any tour of a Norwegian prison.

All the old forms of discrimination, the forms of discrimination we supposedly left behind, are now perfectly legal once you've been labeled a felon.

Bill Clinton championed discriminatory laws against formerly incarcerated people that have kept millions of Americans locked in a cycle of poverty and desperation.