S. J. Rozan Quotes

You grow up in America and you're told from day one, 'This is the land of opportunity.' That everybody has an equal chance to make it in this country. And then you look at places like Harlem, and you say, 'That is absolutely a lie.'

If I wrote in Michael Harrington's time, roughly 50 years later when he published 'The Other America', I'd still be writing about poverty and also entrenched racial injustice.

No matter where you from, there's ghettos all over the place.

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.

In the same way that Occupy Wall Street forever elevated that concept of income inequality, the Black Lives Matter protesters have elevated the idea of inequity in policing as it relates to minority communities.

For the middle class, the police protect property, give directions, and help old ladies. For the urban poor, the police are those who arrest you.

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

I think the rich are too rich and the poor are too poor. I don't think the black people are going to rise at all; I think most of them are going to die.

I had seen so many injustices done in the court by well-meaning people. I had lost fourteen clients to gang violence in only seven years. I was angry at a system I thought had failed my clients, and I was part of it.

In the last era of the [civil rights] movement, the disenfranchised were the blacks, the colored. Now the disenfranchised are the have-nots, the unemployed, the hungry.

We have too many Black men in jail waiting for justice and too many Black women in church waiting for Jesus.

If crime went down 100 percent it would still be 50 percent higher than it should be.

We are less than honest and commit a grave error if we insist that what happened to Rodney G. King was isolated and an exceptional case. The poor know better.

Black and brown communities are significantly and disproportionately impacted by deficiencies in our criminal justice system.

Black Lives Matter was born out of our unwavering love for black people and our undeniable rage over a system that has historically dehumanized black people.

The justice system isn't meant to work for people of color in this country.

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?

At the time when I was in college, Oscar Grant had just lost his life in Oakland, Calif. He was an unarmed young black male who had a record. And at the time when his death was making headlines, more people were talking about what he had done in his past than the fact that he unjustly lost his life.

#BlackLivesMatter brought a new sense of urgency, audacity, and outrage to the issue of police violence against black men that has made it impossible to ignore, to cover up, or to justify.

We don't need to go back in time and make America great again, because really, America was only great for certain people.

The first thing I organized around was the Central Park Five case for the young men who were accused. We talked about the unfair misrepresentation of these young teenagers in the media. I've been fighting back against Donald Trump for a long time.

Too many Black lives have been lost to injustice and brutality in this country.

Blacks commit murder eight times more per capita than any other group in our society. If I had put all of my police officers on Park Avenue and none in Harlem, thousands and thousands more blacks would've been killed during the eight years that I was mayor.

The endurance of the inequalities of life by the poor is the marvel of human society.

I've always been driven by the concept of equal justice under the law, but only the rich can pay great sums of money for legal assistance and that puts them at an advantage over the poor.