Human Rights

Albums – like books and black lives - they still matter.

For Kenyans today, the issue of gay rights is really a non-issue.

The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren’t treated the way I was. They [should be] treated like humans, with valid feelings and human rights. Gender needs to be taught about in schools, the earlier the better. My death needs to mean something. My death needs to be counted in the number of transgender people who commit suicide this year…Fix society. Please.

Today, Paris is the capital of the world.

The movie Selma is a story about the American Civil Rights movement that totally worked and now everything is fine.

Community colleges should be free for those willing to work for it – because, in America, a quality education cannot be a privilege that is reserved for a few. I think it’s a right for everybody who’s willing to work for it.

[We remember] Martin Luther King as an idea, Selma as an idea…what can happen with strategy, with discipline, and with love.

Americans can directly relate to attacks on freedom of speech. They can directly relate to terrorism. And the impact in France is being compared to the impact of 9/11 in the United States. Boko Haram, by contrast, is viewed as a kind of civil war ... and it's all happening a very long way away.

[Tamir Rice’s sister] could not reach him. Her arms could not cradle his body and plead for him to hang on. Her hands could not stroke his cheek, and she could not whisper hopefully, ‘It’s going to be O.K.’ Her eyes could not gaze into his and say what sisters are able to say without saying anything: ‘I love you.

Anyone who's standing with us, we want you to not use Eric Garner's name for violence, because we are not about that. I'm standing here in sorrow about losing those two police officers.

Wrongful convictions are a slow, torturous process. It would be so much simpler to be choked out and die at the hands of a cop than to spend the rest of your life in hell based on the malicious acts of a cop.

The time for remorse would have been when my husband was screaming to breath.