Political Quotes

“Equal justice under the law--impartial and uniformly applied--has been, for more than two centuries, the ideological underpinning of American democracy. But from the very beginning, this noblest aspiration has been intertwined with our struggle with race, a battle that has sometimes come to define our Nation and to divide it in ways that too often cleave us still today. Mr. Speaker, 150 years since the Emancipation Proclamation and half a century after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 formally ended Jim Crow, our President, his Attorney General, the Secretary of Homeland Security, and the National Security Adviser are all African American. Blacks are now prominent in every facet of American life. But much of this has occurred during my lifetime because people marched and sat and voted and demanded greater equality. Yet despite the progress, equal justice under law is not the reality for too many of our fellow citizens, and injustice continues to limit their lives and their livelihoods in ways that are difficult for many White Americans to comprehend. Inequality manifests itself at every rung of the criminal justice system, but its most deadly consequences are to be found in the encounters of young men of color with the police. I have seen the video of Eric Garner in New York and watched the tragedy in Ferguson in the aftermath of the shooting of Michael Brown. The agony of those families and the anger of their communities have rightfully moved the Nation.…”