All of this is on account of we want to register, to become first-class citizens. And if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave, where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily, because we want to live as decent human beings in America?

I was fired from a plantation where I had worked as a sharecropper for eighteen years. I went down to the courthouse to register to vote. The plantation owner told me, “If you don’t go down and withdraw your registration, you will have to leave.” I didn’t go down and withdraw. So he fired me.

I was arrested in Winona, Mississippi, and I was beaten by the police — beaten till I was hard and my body was as hard as a board. I was beaten by a white state highway patrolman until I was unconscious. My dress was pulled up over my head. Another Negro woman was beaten until she couldn’t hardly walk. A young man was beaten until his eyes were swollen shut. All of this on account of we want to register to vote.

We didn’t come all the way up here to compromise for no more than we had gotten down there. We didn’t come all this way for no two seats, because all of us is tired.

I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.

I am in Birmingham because injustice is here. Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly, I have yet to engage in a direct action campaign that was “well timed” in the view of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.”

I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: “I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action”; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom.

We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people. Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be co-workers with God. The time is always ripe to do right.

The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives.

As Black women we see Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.

We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves.

We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.

This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity.

If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.

Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them. If you want freedom, you have to take it. You have to claim it. You have to seize it. Nobody is going to give it to you.

We need to understand what freedom really means. Freedom is not just being allowed to walk down the street without someone harassing you. Freedom is being able to determine your own destiny, to control your own life, to have a say in what happens in your community.

I am not the only one who has suffered. I am not the only one who has been targeted. There are thousands of us. Tens of thousands. And we need to stand together. We need to recognize each other. We need to refuse to be divided. Because that’s what they want. That’s always what they want. They want us fighting each other instead of fighting them.

It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win. We must love each other and support each other. We have nothing to lose but our chains.

The Georgia International Law Enforcement Exchange, or GILEE, has for decades sent Atlanta police officers to Israel to train with the Israeli military and security forces. These exchanges teach American police the same tactics of surveillance, collective punishment, and occupation that Palestinians have endured under apartheid. What they learn there, they bring back here.

Cop City — officially the Atlanta Public Safety Training Center — is the domestic expression of the same logic. A $90 million militarized training facility built on stolen forest land in Weelaunee, against the will of the community, justified by the same narrative of “public safety” that has never meant safety for Black, brown, or poor people anywhere.

These are not separate fights. The same machinery that brutalizes people in occupied Palestine is being trained, tested, and deployed on our streets in Atlanta. The same logic that says a whole neighborhood can be sacrificed for a police facility is the logic that says a whole people can be displaced for a settler state.

Our position is simple: abolish GILEE. Stop Cop City. Defund the police. Fund our communities. The money that goes into armored vehicles and surveillance drones needs to go into housing, healthcare, food, and dignity.

And we will not be silent. We will not wait for permission. We will organize. We will disrupt. We will build the world we know is possible — because the one they’ve given us is not acceptable, and we refuse to accept it.

We are living through a constitutional crisis manufactured by the same forces that have always wielded the law as a weapon against working people, immigrants, and communities of color. The Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign is not an aberration — it is the logical endpoint of a system that has always treated human beings as disposable.

ICE does not make us safer. ICE terrorizes our neighbors. ICE separates families. ICE operates with near-total impunity because it was designed to. The abolition of ICE is not a slogan — it is the only position consistent with basic human dignity.

We know what works: organized communities that refuse to cooperate. Rapid response networks that show up when a raid happens. Know-your-rights training that transforms fear into preparedness. Legal defense funds that ensure no one faces the machine alone. These are not radical acts — they are acts of survival. But in a country that has made survival a crime for so many, survival is radical.

When we say defend the immigrant, we mean it. When we say abolish ICE, we mean it. When we say free them all, we mean it. And we will not stop until every single person in this city — documented or not — knows that when they are under attack, we stand with them. Because if they come for one of us, they come for all of us. And we refuse to let them take anyone.

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

History is not the past. It is the present. We carry our history with us. We are our history. If we pretend otherwise, we literally are criminals.

I attest to this: the world is not white. It never was white. It can’t be white. White is a metaphor for power. And that is simply a way of describing Chase Manhattan Bank.

Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word “love” here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace — not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.

You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who had ever been alive.

The paradox of education is precisely this — that as one begins to become conscious, one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated. The purpose of education, finally, is to create in a person the ability to look at the world for himself, to make his own decisions.