A Quote by Keith Ellison

I'll never forget working to get my college, Wayne State University, to divest from the government in South Africa. This was the beginning of my activism, and the fight for social and economic justice has been a constant thread in my life.
As a young man in South Africa at the beginning of the twentieth century, Gandhi developed satyagraha, a mode of political activism based upon moral persuasion, while mobilizing South Africa's small Indian minority against racial discrimination.
We have fought for social justice. We have fought for economic justice. We have fought for environmental justice. We have fought for criminal justice. Now we must add a new fight - the fight for electoral justice.
I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words.
It violates right order whenever capital so employs the working or wage-earning classes as to divert business and economic activity entirely to its own arbitrary will and advantage, without any regard to the human dignity of the workers, the social character of economic life, social justice, and the common good.
It's enough to play for South Africa and take wickets for South Africa, and then I managed to get 400. I never thought that that would happen.
South Africa is regarded as being an extraordinarily important country - not just for South Africa, but for Southern Africa, for the BRICS, working now in a new way in which power is becoming more shared - thankfully.
When I was in government, the South African economy was growing at 4.5% - 5%. But then came the global financial crisis of 2008/2009, and so the global economy shrunk. That hit South Africa very hard, because then the export markets shrunk, and that includes China, which has become one of the main trade partners with South Africa. Also, the slowdown in the Chinese economy affected South Africa. The result was that during that whole period, South Africa lost something like a million jobs because of external factors.
Economic issues are a subset of social justice. Social justice is unimaginable without economic justice. Isn't that obvious?
It is considered in England and the United States that the Government of South Africa is altogether too harsh with its native peoples. It is sadly humorous to notice that the native in South Africa, however, holds an exactly reverse opinion and the fault he finds with the South African Government is that it is far too lenient in its administration of laws throughout the native populace.
In the years of the Reagan-Bush administration alone, about 1.5 million people were killed by South Africa just in the surrounding countries. Forget what was happening in South Africa and Namibia.
The far right is saying to us: Forget about the two-state solution, it is going to be a Jewish state from the coast to Jordan. The left wing says you have to forget about Jewish self-determination, you will have to live as a minority in an Arab state - just like the whites in South Africa. The key word that both have in mind is that the situation in the West Bank is "irrevocable." It is one of the words I dislike the most.
You who have never “been there” in the throes of grief, have no idea what is going on inside the head of the grieving spouse: the scattered thoughts, the constant worry that we will forget something or someone in our fog-induced state, that strange feeling of not quite “being all there” when out in social situations, the pall that covers everything, like a cloak of sadness that never lifts.
I have been personally victimized by organized disruption of a public lecture on a university campus - at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Michigan State University, and Rhode Island's Providence College, to name only a few.
I've been down to the University of South Carolina, University of Maryland, Clemson, spent some time on different college campuses and I see that small-town family environment.
Over the years, I've found that I either live life or write about it. I can't seem to do both simultaneously - I have to do it sequentially. When I write incessantly, I lose touch with the issues and passions that fuel the work. But when I get too involved in organizations or movement endeavors, I almost forget that I'm a writer. It's a constant struggle to find a balance between these two worlds - the solitary writing life and the life of a social justice activist.
I am thankful for the strong, united response of our university community to the desecration of the James Meredith statue last year, confirming our university values of civility and respect. what it is saying is that the only possible justice for a black in the state of Mississippi is the federal government and if there's anything that we don't need it's that being our only means of expecting justice.
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