Yvonne Brathwaite Burke Quotes

We cannot reform institutional racism or systemic policies if we are not actively engaged. It's not enough to simply complain about injustice; the only way to prevent future injustice is to create the society we would like to see, one where we are all equal under the law.

Don't count on Congress. Laws come into being because people on the ground demand it.

We have talked long enough in this country about equal rights. We have talked for one hundred years or more. It is time now to write the next chapter, and to write it in the books of law.

Experience has shown that no civil right has ever been secured without legislation.

Change the narrative, change the laws.

Awareness in our society has flipped all types of injustice on its head.

I grew up in the 1970s, but I don't think a whole lot had changed from the '60s. Oh, it had changed in the law books - but not in the kitchens of white homes.

What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.

If you want good laws, burn those you have and make new ones.

Every major social movement in our history was fueled in large part by religion and faith. Abolitionism, women’s suffrage, child labor law, and most famously, civil rights.

If society is to be responsive to human needs, a vast restructuring of our laws is essential ... A vast restructuring of our society is needed if remedies are to become available to the average person.

The work does not end with the abolition of slavery but only begins.

Laws and customs may be creative of vice; and should be therefore perpetually under process of observation and correction.

In our struggle against apartheid, the great supporters were Jewish people. They almost instinctively had to be on the side of the disenfranchised, of the voiceless ones, fighting injustice, oppression and evil.

Law and justice are not always the same. When they aren't, destroying the law may be the first step toward changing it.

The New Deal ultimately undermined Jim Crow’s prospects. The very legislation embraced by Southern segregationists created at first mere chinks, then whole openings for social change that were grasped by an incipient, soon powerful, movement for equal rights for Blacks.

We also know that religion, as the Marxists have always insisted, has, too often, like an opiate, tended to put people to sleep to the reality and the need for the present struggle for peace and justice.

My mother informed me that the way to be a change agent to create change, the first line of defense, or however you want to phrase that, is politics and government.

It took 15 years and a Labour government to finally see Section 28 taken off the statute books. But this victory belongs to the LGBT+ activists who campaigned for so many years, fighting for change from the ground up.

I am mindful that the goal of protest is not more protest, but the goal of protest is change.

If Planned Parenthood and Human Rights Campaign were part of the establishment, that would be time for all of us to just quit having to work so hard and defend it and fight for it.

Unjust laws have to be fought ideologically; they cannot be fought or corrected by means of mere disobedience and futile martyrdom.

Our focus has to be on changing reality, not changing laws.

I honestly do not know if civil disobedience has any effect on the government. I can promise you it has a great effect on the person who chooses to do it.

We are here, not because we are law-breakers; we are here in our efforts to become law-makers.