Lori Lightfoot Quotes

I don't understand Chicago, but I really do hope that the Commander-in-Chief addresses his home town. I think those young kids don't see outside their small box. I think they don't see outside their circumstances, so they kind of resort to anything.

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.

It's hard for me to view Baltimore outside the context of what Baltimore has always been in my mind: a violent place.

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

Violence of all forms is wreaking havoc in communities across the country, disproportionately impacting communities of color and shaving half a million years of life off our collective lifespan. But it doesn't have to be this way.

If the truth be known, we are on the verge of losing an entire generation of our young people, killing and dying in the streets of America.

It wasn't until I left that I realised it's not weird to grow up in certain cities and, by the age of 27 or 28, for all of your friends to still be alive. I can think of a lot of kids that I knew in Chicago who were supposed to grow up but didn't.

Thug Life to me is dead.

I am deeply saddened for the people of Ferguson who woke up to see parts of their community in ruins. No one should have to live like this; no one deserves this. We must do better, and we will.

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.

I was born in West Baltimore, lived in a situation in which violence was everywhere.

Part of the attraction of the riots is the looting, which seems to be almost unrestrained. I always thought that when rioting breaks out, looters must be shot. Otherwise the situation will get entirely out of hand. [Lyndon] Johnson has made all the right gestures but it is exceedingly difficult to see any end to the tension, let alone the violence which seems to be in some way part of the American way of life.

I know now that gang warfare is not the Middle East or Northern Ireland. There is violence in gang violence, but there is no conflict. It is not 'about something.' It is the language of the despondent and traumatized.

I've seen people get robbed, seen people get shot with my own eyes, for pointless petty crimes.

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.

I grew up in Compton: 116th and Wilmington.

The problem of the Panthers is that they scared people. The music of N.W.A didn't scare people; it taught people what it was like to grow up in our inner cities.

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.

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

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.

In 1990, when we started the Black Community Crusade for Children, we were always talking about all children, but we paid particular attention to children who were not white, who were poor, who were disabled, and who were the most vulnerable.Parents didn't think their children would live to adulthood, and the children didn't think they were going to live to adulthood. That's when we started our first gun-violence campaign. We've lost 17 times more young black people to gun violence since 1968 than we lost in all the lynching in slavery.

All Americans should be deeply troubled by the fatal shootings of Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. We've seen such tragedies far too many times, and our hearts go out to the families and communities who've suffered such a painful loss.

I'm not fearful for myself, because I've seen adversity, and I can see it again. But I feel very upset and anguished when I see images of young lawyers beaten up.

I watched the Sandra Bland documentary and her tape itself over and over and over and over again, and just the reality of that, the fear in that.

Racism is systemic: It's oppression that's built into the laws, legislation, into the way neighborhoods are policed, and into job opportunities and health care and education.