Top 100 Quotes & Sayings by Patrisse Cullors - Page 2

During my high-risk pregnancy, I consistently experienced subpar care from my hospital, which led me to hire two midwives instead. They provided me with excellent and loving care, and they made my pregnancy a truly special and powerful moment in my life.

For those looking outside-in, it's not fair - or accurate - to assign someone an identity based off the first thing that we see.

Black women voted against Roy Moore not because they necessarily wanted the other guy; they voted against Roy Moore because they knew that would be better for the people of Alabama and, to be frank, better for the rest of the country.

With support from techies, designers, artists and thousands of activists across the country, Black Lives Matter is now an online-to-offline political movement, affirming the humanity and resilience of black communities.

Presidential elections and the voter experience have long been fraught for black people. From racist poll taxes to made-up literacy tests to the egregious rollback of voting rights over the past 50 years, American democracy has, at times, felt like a weird and failed social experiment.

I think our work as movement leaders isn't just about our own visibility but rather how do we make the whole visible. How do we not just fight for our individual selves but fight for everybody?

Colin Kaepernick is one of the leaders in the movement for black lives. His role as an athlete and activist is not only motivating but inspiring.

In high school, I came out to my friends as queer. My entire world opened up; this was a monumental step toward unveiling my truest self. I had my first girlfriend when I was sixteen years old.

My personal history, along with the history of many black people in this country, is rife with trauma born out of anti-black policies aided and facilitated by presidents and their administrations.

With Black Lives Matter, we knew from the very beginning that it wasn't just going to live online. We were like, 'We're creating this thing and then it's also going to live with black folks on the street and protests and organizations.' It was very important for us to use the hashtag as a way to have a larger conversation and as an organizing tool.

My first reaction to Trump being elected was a visceral one. I cried for black people in general but, more particularly, for those of us at the margins who have been struggling and who have never received enough support.

#BlackLivesMatter is about black pride and black power and standing up against a world that tries to annihilate us.

Throughout every presidency since the heist of our country from indigenous peoples, the black American experience has been exceptional in its discomfort. And no chief executive of this great nation has, in earnest, developed a unique plan to remedy that discomfort.

As a black millennial, I remember with horrid detail how Democratic policies ravaged my community and destroyed my family.

When I was younger, I had these romantic ideas about the Black Panther Party and what it meant to be a part of the civil rights movement. Then we're here, and it's dangerous. And it's dangerous to say, 'Black lives matter.'

Each and every one of us has multiple identities, and this is a fact that should be celebrated. I for example, am a queer black woman who grew up poor in Los Angeles.

I think so much of my life had me growing up under extreme poverty and really challenging conditions, with having the police in my neighborhood and seeing the impact of over-incarceration. Having a father love up on me and remind of who I was, and my strength against those conditions, really shaped why I'm an organizer today.

The unfortunate reality is the alt-right has captured white people's imagination.

Racism has its boot squarely wedged on the neck of black communities, and we don't want to be told that hard work and responsibility are the answer.

So many stories have been told about Black Lives Matter. The beauty of building out a decentralized network, the beauty of building out something that's a hashtag, is that so many people can take it and run with it. The bad part about that is so many folks can take it and run with it - and misuse it and co-opt it.

The only way to gain the kinds of often-generational wealth that the 1% has been able to gain is through controlling the populations it relied on to make its wealth.

Generations of black women have anxiously watched as our children walk out into a world set against them. We teach them how to respond to police and how to react to racist comments, knowing that these lessons are not guaranteed to protect our children.

I am part of a legacy of queer black women who have fought for the freedom of black people across the globe.

I've been in movement work since I was 16 years old. Black Lives Matter becomes an important part of the story, but it's not the only part of the story.

Black Lives Matter is one iteration of a much larger struggle to fight for black people's freedom.

The story of Black Lives Matter starts before Black Lives Matter. The story of Black Lives Matter, for me, starts with my childhood.

I have never felt the grips of patriarchy and its need to erase black women and our labor... so strongly until the creation of Black Lives Matter.

Because of network neutrality rules, activists can turn to the Internet to bypass the discrimination of mainstream cable, broadcast, and print outlets as we organize for change.

We have to look at queerness as a means towards challenging normativity.

The first thing that Black Lives Matter had to do was remind people that racism existed in this country because when we had Obama, people thought we were post-racial. That was the debate. Is racism over? And very quickly, we understood that it was not over.

I grew up in a neighborhood that was heavily policed. I witnessed my brothers and my siblings continuously stopped and frisked by law enforcement. I remember my home being raided. And one of my questions as a child was, why? Why us? Black Lives Matter offers answers to the why.

We should be developing spaces and places that are thinking about how we care for the group vs. asking the individual to take care of themselves.

I think publicly declaring that mistakes are a part of how we grow and how we heal is absolutely necessary.

The Black Lives Matter National Network and the movement at large are sophisticated. We're not easily won over by talking points and campaign trail pledges. We want to see meaningful collaboration and a genuine transformation of American democracy.

The Internet is the most democratic communication platform in history, largely because we've had network neutrality rules that make sure all web traffic is treated equally, and no voices are discriminated against.

I read everything and anything related to being queer. I found solace in reading authors like Audre Lorde and bell hooks, who would become my activist staples - their words helped me grow up and taught me how to be bold and courageous. By studying them, I came to understand that being young and queer and black would not be easy.

When you grow up with a significant amount of trauma, you are realizing it as you get older, and you're realizing the ways you can recover from that trauma. The things that I have witnessed and that I have been through, it's going to take a lifetime to undo.

Every community has crime and violence; it's a part of being human. This idea that black communities are more violent than others is just false. But black folks fight the hardest for our communities. Before governments do, before other people do, we're the first ones to show up. We are the first ones to fight for our lives.

I knew marriage was not the answer to changing the conditions for poor, black, queer folks. So I never felt compelled to get married - it just didn't seem important. But even if marriage wasn't right for me at the time, or a quick fix toward black empowerment, I found it repulsive that loving same-sex couples were refused the right.

We need to fight for a new human rights movement that recognizes and values black life.