When the protests began, of course, around the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery and Tony McDade and many others who have l… - Angela Davis

The Klu Klux Klan and the racial segregation that was so dramatically challenged during the mid-twentieth century freedom movement was produced not during slavery but rather in an attempt to manage free black people who would have been far more successful in pushing forward democracy for all.

The most immediate question today is how to prevent as many imprisoned women and men as possible back into what prisoners call "the free world." How can we move to decriminalize drug use and the trade in sexual services? How can we take seriously strategies of restorative rather than elusively punitive justice? Effective alternatives involve both transformation of the techniques for addressing "crime" and of the social and economic conditions that track so many children from poor communities, and especially communities of color, into the juvenile system and then on to prison. The most difficult and urgent challenge today is that of creatively exploring the new terrain of justice, where the prison no longer serves as our major anchor.

Insofar as the military contest between the North and the South was a war to overthrow the Southern slaveholding class, it was a war which had been basically conducted in the interests of the Northern bourgeoisie, i.e., the young and enthusiastic industrial capitalists who found their political voice in the Republican party. The Northern capitalists sought economic control over the entire nation. Their struggle against the Southern slaveocracy did not therefore mean that they supported the liberation of Black men or women as human beings.