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People in this country are still unaware of the fact that former slaves brought public education to the South. That white kids in the South would never have had the opportunity to get an education had not it been for the persistent campaigns for education. Because education was equivalent to liberation. No liberation without education.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (70%)

a central endeavor of feminist, queer, and trans activists has been to dismantle the cultural ideologies, social practices, and legal norms that say certain body parts determine gender identity and gendered social characteristics and roles. We have fought against the idea that the presence of uteruses, or ovaries, or penises, or testicles, should be understood to determine such things as people’s intelligence, proper parental roles, proper physical appearance, proper gender identity, proper labor roles, proper sexual partners and activities, and capacity to make decisions. We have opposed medical and scientific assertions that affirm the purported health of traditional gender roles and activities that pathologize bodies that defy these norms. We continue to work to dispel myths that body parts somehow make us who we are (and make us “less than” or “better than,” depending on which we may have).

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (63%)

Deep understandings of racist violence arm us against deceptive solutions. When we are told that we simply need better police and better prisons, we counter with what we really need. We need to reimagine security, which will involve the abolition of policing and imprisonment as we know them. We will say demilitarize the police, disarm the police, abolish the institution of the police as we know it, and abolish imprisonment as the dominant mode of punishment. But we will have only just begun to tell the truth about violence in America.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (56%)

If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (42%)

As a matter of fact, trans people of color constitute the group most likely to be arrested and imprisoned. Racism provides the fuel for maintenance, reproduction, and expansion of the prison-industrial complex.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (40.3%)

This appalling treatment of undocumented immigrants from the UK to the US compels us to make connections with Palestinians who have been transformed into immigrants against their will, indeed into undocumented immigrants on their own ancestral lands. I repeat—on their own land. G4S and similar companies provide the technical means of forcibly transforming Palestinian into immigrants on their own land.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (39.4%)

. . . we constantly have to make connections. So that when we are engaged in the struggle against racist violence, in relation to Ferguson, Michael Brown, and New York, Eric Garner, we can’t forget the connections with Palestine. So in many ways I think we have to engage in an exercise of intersectionality. Of always foregrounding those connections so that people remember that nothing happens in isolation. That when we see the police repressing protests in Ferguson we also have to think about the Israeli police and the Israeli army repressing protests in occupied Palestine.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (33.3%)

Many people are under the impression that it was Abraham Lincoln who played the major role, and he did as a matter of fact help to accelerate the move toward abolition, but it was the decision on the part of slaves to emancipate themselves and to join the Union Army—both women and men—that was primarily responsible for the victory over slavery. It was the slaves themselves and of course the abolitionist movement that led to the dismantling of slavery.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (27.7%)

I don’t think we can rely on governments, regardless of who is in power, to do the work that only mass movements can do. I think what is most important about the sustained demonstrations that are now happening is that they are having the effect of refusing to allow these issues to die.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (27.3%)

Reform doesn’t come after the advent of the prison; it accompanies the birth of the prison. So prison reform has always only created better prisons. In the process of creating better prisons, more people are brought under the surveillance of the correctional and law enforcement networks. . . Just keep on sending them to prison. Then of course, in prison they find themselves within a violent institution that reproduces violence. In many ways you can say that the institution feeds on that violence and reproduces it so that when the person is released he or she is probably worse.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (20.3%)

This is one of the reasons I think so many people began to identify with the struggle against apartheid in South Africa. It wasn’t a sense of “Oh, we have to lend solidarity to these people over there in South Africa.” It was because they began to see that we have a common…connection. If that’s not created, no matter how much you appeal to people, no matter how genuinely you invite them to join you, they will continue to see the activity as yours, not theirs.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (19.5%)

. . . it might be important to point out that the Israeli police have been involved in the training of US police. So there is this connection between the US military and the Israeli military. And therefore it means that when we try to organize campaigns in solidarity with Palestine, when we try to challenge the Israeli state, it’s not simply about focusing our struggles elsewhere, in another place. It also has to do with what happens in US communities.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (16%)

I grew up in the US South at a time when the Ku Klux Klan was permitted by governments to engage in terrorist assaults against Black communities. At the time I was in jail, having been falsely charged with murder, kidnapping, and conspiracy and turned into a target of institutional violence, I was the one being asked whether I agreed with violence. Very bizarre. I was also attempting to point out that advocacy of revolutionary transformation was not primarily about violence, but about substantive issues like better life conditions for poor people and people of color.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (12.5%)

It is essential to resist the depiction of history as the work of heroic individuals in order for people today to recognize their potential agency as a part of an ever-expanding community of struggle.

— Freedom Is a Constant Struggle by Angela Davis (9.5%)