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“Living with the daily ugliness of slum life, educational castration and economic exploitation, some ghetto dwellers now and then strike out in spasms of violence and self-defeating riots. A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard. It is the desperate, suicidal cry of one who is so fed up with the powerlessness of his cave existence that he asserts that he would rather be dead than ignored.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“To smash something is the ghetto's chronic need. Most of the time it is the members of the ghetto who smash each other, and themselves. But as long as the ghetto walls are standing there will always come a moment when these outlets do not work.”
― James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son

“If your every choice is in defiance of a system, you are as much a servant of that system as someone who obeys it.”
― Veronica Roth, Poster Girl

“If administration actions are not to mock its own rhetoric, the President must now take the lead in mobilizing public opinion behind a new resolve to meet the crisis in our cities. He should now put before Congress a National Emergency Public Works and Reconstruction bill aimed at building housing for homeless victims of the riot-torn ghettos, repairing damaged public facilities, and in the process generating maximum employment opportunities for unskilled and semiskilled workers. Such a bill should be the first step in the imperative reconstruction of all our decaying center cities.

Admittedly, the prospects for passage of such a bill in the present Congress are dismal. Congressmen will cry out that the rioters must not be re-warded, thereby further penalizing the very victims of the riots. This, after all, is a Congress capable of defeating a meager $40 million rat extermination program the same week it votes $10 million for an aquarium in the District of Columbia!

But the vindictive racial meanness that has descended upon this Congress, already dominated by the revived coalition of Republicans and Dixiecrats, must be challenged—not accommodated. The President must go directly to the people, as Harry Truman did in 1948. He must go to them, not with slogans, but with a timetable for tearing down every slum in the country.

There can be no further delay. The daydreamers and utopians are not those of us who have prepared massive Freedom Budgets and similar programs. They are the smugly "practical" and myopic philistines in the Congress, the state legislatures, and the city halls who thought they could sit it out. The very practical choice now before them and the American people is whether we shall have a conscious and authentic democratic social revolution or more tragic and futile riots that tear our nation to shreds.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“Lighting: a hundred Watts
Detroit, Newark and New York
Screeching nerves, exploding minds
lives tied to
a policeman's whistle
a welfare worker's doorbell
finger”
― Maya Angelou, A Song Flung Up to Heaven

“Lieutenant Thomas R. Gilligan, thirty-seven, was off duty and out of uniform, checking out TVs in an electronics store. He went to investigate the commotion and stopped James Powell, a ninth grader who had joined the mob of angry students. Powell was unarmed, according to witnesses. Gilligan maintained that the boy flashed a knife. He shot him three times.

Two days later, Harlem erupted.

Pierce told Carney, "You have the people who are angry. Justifably so. And then there's the police force. How are they going to defend this shit? Again! And city hall and the activists. And in the way back of the room, you can barely hear a little voice, and that's the family. They've lost a son. Somebody has to speak for them."

"They're going to sue?"

"Sue and win. You know they ain't going to fire the bastard." Sermon crept into his voice here. "What kind of message will that send--that their police force is accountable? We'll sue, and it will take years, and the city will pay because millions and millions are still cheaper than putting a true price on killing a black boy.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“Political change--alterations in public mood, sharp shifts in crowd sentiment, the collapse of party allegiance--has long been a subject of intense interest to academics and intellectuals of all kinds. There is a vast literature on revolutions, as well as a mini-genre of formulas designed to predict them. Most of these investigations focus on measurable, quantifiable economic criteria, like degrees of inequality or standards of living. Many seek to predict what level of economic pain--how much starvation, how much poverty--will produce a reaction, force people to the street, persuade them to take risks.

Very recently, this question has become more difficult to answer. In the Western world, the vast majority of people are not starving. They have food and shelter. They are literate. If we describe them as "poor" or "deprived," it is sometimes because they lack things that human beings couldn't dream of a century ago, like air-conditioning or Wi-Fi. In this new world, it may be that big, ideological changes are not caused by bread shortages but by new kinds of disruptions. These new revolutions may not even look like the old revolutions at all. In a world where most political debate takes place online or on television, you don't need to go out on the street and wave a banner to assert your allegiance. In order to manifest a sharp change in political affiliation, all you have to do is switch channels, turn to a different website every morning, or start following a different group of people on social media.”
― Anne Applebaum, Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism

“It is understandable that the white community should fear the outbreak of riots. They are indefensible as weapons of struggle, and Negroes must sympathize with whites who feel menaced by them. Indeed, Negroes are themselves no less menaced, and those living in the ghetto always suffer most directly from the destructive turbulence of a riot.

Yet the average white person also has a responsibility. He has to resist the impulse to seize upon the rioter as the exclusive villain. He has to rise up with indignation against his own municipal, state and national governments to demand that the necessary reforms be instituted which alone will protect him. If he reserves his resentment only for the Negro, he will be the victim by allowing those who have the greatest culpability to evade responsibility.

Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention. There is no other answer. Constructive social change will bring certain tranquility; evasions will merely encourage turmoil.

Negroes hold only one key to the double lock of peaceful change. The other is in the hands of the white community.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“In this year of riots I am called to duty
Through this year of angers I have gripped a meaning
In this year of lies and angers burning out of control I went out and met history on its own terms
And I have come back to tell you what I saw:
Uprisings everywhere—they'll riot anytime—anything goes that'll feed a flame;
Warnings unheeded—stopwatches hurtling—direct lies expected and received�

Fires burning out of control in the streets

"WHO'S THAT OUT THERE IN THAT STRANGE RED LIGHT?"

"We call you to answer for your indiscretions, Mr. Johnson."

The time has come for me to have it out with America on the battlefields of my ancestry.
In my short lifetime I have seen America lose faith in her own greatness�
This year of riots and angers burning out of control announces one great covenant broken: The summit once reached and past, the terror begins.”
― Charles Upton, Panic Grass

“On ordinary days we each walk alone or with a companion or two on the sidewalks, and the streets are used for transit and for commerce. On extraordinary days—on the holidays that are anniversaries of historic and religious events and on the days we make history ourselves—we walk together, and the whole street is for stamping out the meaning of the day.”
― Rebecca Solnit, Wanderlust: A History of Walking

“Haiti was the stuff of American nightmare: a nation of black slaves who had killed off their white masters.”
― N.K. Jemisin, How Long 'til Black Future Month?

“In this world, those who value Peace more than Justice deserve neither.”
― Njau Kihia