Yolanda King Quotes

I was brought up in this part of Detroit that they used to call the ghetto.

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

I grew up with pretty much nothing - in the hood, the ghetto - whatever you want to call it.

It was a pretty rough neighborhood where I grew up The really tough places were over around Third Avenue where it ran into the Harlem River, but we weren't far away.

If you go to probably any jury trial in Baltimore that involves violence, either an assault or murder, and watch the voir dire, to me, that's when you get a sense of what it's like to live in Baltimore.

I grew up on 135th Street. I grew up on the poor side of New York. I grew up in Harlem.

I started working at a soup kitchen in skid row of Los Angeles when I was 13 years old, and the first day, I felt really scared. I was young, and it was rough and raw down there, and though I was with a great volunteer group, I just felt overwhelmed.

In Hoboken, when I was a kid, I lived in a plenty tough neighborhood.

I grew up in the 'hood, but it was like growing up in Beverly Hills because there were so many superstars around.

If I could help every ghetto, I would.

I am from the ghetto.

My parents came from very humble families. My grandfather had a construction business coming from farmland, and my grandmother could never read or write. We were very spoiled. We had a nice house - and then, all of a sudden, we had nothing.

I was raised in inner-city Liverpool, the first in my family to go to university.

I am from the inner city, the ghetto. If I can use my platform to carry on a legacy and talk about something that's real, I have to do that, period.

I just thought everybody lived around abandoned buildings and crack-heads, ... I lived in the ghetto until I was like 19. I came to Los Angeles, stayed at hotels and stuff. When I got back and I saw what my neighborhood looked like, I started getting scared.

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 but every time I go back, I'm seeing the same things that I lived. That's one of the things I mean when I say, "My feet back onto the ground."

What we were all always saying with 'The Wire' was that there's a whole group of people that America just sort of wants to throw away. They want to forget about them, and if they could, they'd get rid of them. They are Americans - they're worth saving; they're worth helping.

I'm from the Southside of Chicago.

I grew up in Compton: 116th and Wilmington.

I get emotionally spent answering questions about my dead father and my criminal friends and my upbringing in a hippie environment in a marginalized community.

You can live an entire lifetime in Chicago and not hear a gunshot, but if you go in a certain neighborhood then you can live your whole lifetime hearing gunshots all the time.

Death, disease, and divorce affect wealthy suburbs as well as the inner city.

Growing up in Orangeburg, I didn't know that I lived in the 'corridor of shame.' I was the son of a single mom who learned to read from comic books. My grandparents helped raise me.

My dad was born with no money.

I'm lucky to have football. My father was 16 when he worked in the mines. That's practically a child, going down the mines.