“I want my children to grow up knowing that their lives matter.”— Kim Kardashian, kimkardashianwest.com
“I’m here to say we must reject such despair. I’m here to insist that we are not as divided as we seem. I know that because I know America. I know how far we’ve come against impossible odds. I know we’ll make it because of what I’ve experienced in my own life, what I’ve seen of this country and its p…”— Barack Obama, whitehouse.gov
“I am sick of writing this poem but bring the boy. his new name his same old body. ordinary, black dead thing. bring him & we will mourn until we forget what we are mourning & isn’t that what being black is about?”— Danez Smith, sadeandriazabala.com
“I demand a war to bring the dead boy back no matter what his name is this time.”— Danez Smith, sadeandriazabala.com
“The losers under this injustice system are the young people I know and love.”— Mariame Kaba, thenewinquiry.com
“How much time will I spend finding the correct words to say that the color of a person’s skin is not justification for ending their life? And how much time will elapse until those words mean anything to the people who actually kill us?”— Kara Brown, jezebel.com
“Who the hell wants to have a police officer put their hand on them or yell and scream at them? It’s an awful experience. Every black man I know has had this experience. Every one of them. It is hard to believe that the world is your oyster if the police can rough you up without punishment. And when…”— Roland G. Fryer Jr., nytimes.com
“We need a special prosecutor, now. And a prosecutor who can look at these cases of police brutality or police wrongdoing and make real judgments and decide whether people should go to trial.”— Russell Simmons, newsone.com
“It seems that it's either pro-cop and anti-black or pro-black and anti-cop, when, in reality, you can be pro-cop and pro-black, which is what we should all be. It is what we should be aiming for.”— Trevor Noah, cc.com
“When you know, we been hurt, been down before, nigga When my pride was low, lookin' at the world like, 'where do we go, nigga?' And we hate Popo, wanna kill us dead in the street for sure, nigga I'm at the preacher's door My knees gettin' weak and my gun might blow but we gon' be alright”— Kendrick Lamar, play.spotify.com
“The Constitution gives you the right, as a white man, to have a rifle in your home. The Constitution gives you the right to protect yourself. Why is it ‘ominous’ when black people even talk of having rifles? Why don’t we have the right to self-defense? Is it because maybe you know we’re going to hav…”— James Baldwin, amazon.com
“Indeed, in America there is a strange and powerful belief that if you stab a black person ten times, the bleeding stops and the healing begins the moment the assailant drops the knife. We believe white dominance to be a fact of the inert past, a delinquent debt that can be made to disappear if only…”— Ta-Nehisi Coates, theatlantic.com
“Columbia, South Carolina just fired the CAPTAIN of the Fire Department after he posted online that he was considering running over some Black Lives Matter activists if he saw them. America. 2016.”— Shaun King, facebook.com
“Police abuse in black and brown communities is generations old. It is nothing new. It has become more visible to mainstream America largely because of the proliferation of personal recording devices, cellphone cameras, video recorders — they're everywhere. We need police officers. We also need them…”— Redditt Hudson, vox.com
“No matter what an officer has done to a black person, that officer can always cover himself in the running narrative of heroism, risk, and sacrifice that is available to a uniformed police officer by virtue of simply reporting for duty.”— Redditt Hudson, vox.com
“On any given day, in any police department in the nation, 15 percent of officers will do the right thing no matter what is happening. Fifteen percent of officers will abuse their authority at every opportunity. The remaining 70 percent could go either way depending on whom they are working with.”— Redditt Hudson, vox.com