I think my imagination about jobs was pretty limited. There were so few jobs that I actually saw people who looked like me in, that I imagined myself in, that I think I just stopped imagining.

I think that I, because of student government and because of working in Baltimore, knew how to be creative with very little resources.

I wasn't a very good writer before college. I don't think I was a very good reader.

I have a platform, and I can help. I can be in spaces that reporters will never be in because I'm a protester.

The student newspapers are as important to me as the 'New York Times.'

Sometimes, the hate that I endure is not necessarily about me but about the space I'm in.

I just couldn't believe that the police would fire tear gas into what had been a peaceful protest. I was running around, face burning, and nothing I saw looked like America to me.

When I tweet, I'm mostly preaching to the choir.

I take statements that portray untrue statements about me seriously.

People are not as imaginative as they think they are.

Protest is political. It is as political as what our conception of America is.

I love Baltimore. This city has made me the man that I am.

I am running to be the 50th mayor of Baltimore in order to usher our city into an era where the government is accountable to its people and is aggressively innovative in how it identifies and solves its problems.

So many of us don't know what we want; we just know we don't want what we have. We spend 99% of the time talking about how bad it is, but only 1% of the time talking about how we can do something about it.

I've never been a surrogate for Bernie, Hillary, or the DNC.

I have a big following on Twitter, and Twitter has been invaluable for mobilizing and quickly sharing information. But I'm not really sure that people are learning deep content on Twitter.

A lot of organizers are trying to figure out how do we create entrances for people so they can be involved in the work in a way that makes them feel is aligned to the things they're interested in and not the things the organizer is interested in?

Activism in the street is truth-telling, and organizing is talking to people for a specific goal.

We have to create a world where people can show up as whole people every single time.

As a gay black man, it's important to me to show up - that I'm able to show up as my whole self, in every space that I'm in, because that's how I'm able to be the most true to who I am.

Twitter is half me trying to live in the world and half me processing and sharing the world. I share a lot, and some of that is to keep me honest.

There are very few things that I don't talk about - even my relationships.

Expressing and loving myself is often so much more complex than 'out' affords me.

It is not a new tactic for people to use any avenue they can to silence black activists.

Baltimore is a city of possibility, and we've got to challenge the traditional pathways of politics and politicians who lay those paths.

Social media allowed us to become our own storytellers. With it, we seized the power of our truth.

There is nothing romantic about teargas. Or smoke bombs or rubber bullets or sound cannons.

I will never forget the first time I was teargassed or the night I hid under my steering wheel as the SWAT vehicle drove down a residential street. I will never forget that it was illegal - in St Louis, in the fall of 2014 - to stand still.

I am often asked what it is like to be on the 'front line.' But I do not use the term 'front line' to describe us, the protesters. Because everywhere in America, wherever we are, our blackness puts us in close proximity to police violence.

I'm not convinced that stealing an iPhone is a felony or stealing a bike is a felony.

Baltimore is a beautiful city. I started doing a lot of community organizing back in 1999 and met so many great people in neighborhoods all across the city. And that was an invaluable experience.

I think people who are not from here think the Inner Harbor is the only center for culture or fun in the city, and there's so much more to Baltimore. The Harbor's a beautiful place, but there are so many gems embedded in other communities that don't get as much visibility.

Skills acquisition is really at the heart of what it means to learn.

Some people are more interested in fighting than winning.

As a protester, I protested because I had to, not because it was exciting. I don't want to get tear-gassed again.

When I think about protest, I worry so much that people think about it only as standing in the streets. And I say that as someone who has been standing in the streets of cities across the country - but at the root of it is this idea of telling the truth in public.

The history of blackness is also a history of erasure.

Everybody has told the story of black people in struggle except black people. The black people in the struggle haven't had the means to tell the story historically. There were a million slaves, but you see very few slave narratives. And that is intentional.

You are enough to start a movement. Individual people can come together around things that they know are unjust. And they can spark change.

People like to act like we don't have a legacy of racism here. I think people get really uncomfortable with it. We know that we can't change it unless we address that.

I think about Twitter as the friend that's always awake. It's why I tweet so much.

I think the reality is that there's a role for everybody to play in the work of social justice and that we have to organize everybody. That means that Silicon Valley has to be organized, the fashion industry has to be organized, the formerly incarcerated have to be organized, the teachers.

I think that Silicon Valley and technology can play a huge role in redefining what community looks like and how people come together and what authentic relationships look like, but that is not only their burden.

It will always be important that people continue to push on the system from the outside. It will also be important that people make the changes that we know are necessary on the inside.

I'm not a politician. I'm somebody who knows the world can be better, and I'm willing to fight for it.

Systemic change rarely comes overnight.

I actually get very little phone calls. I get way more tweets and texts. My phone rarely rings.

People are more afraid of black unity than black rage.

The police, at their best, do three things; they prevent crime, they respond to crime, and they solve crime. In all three of those buckets, they need the trust of the community to do it, so I believe that if we restore the trust that we will change the way police are experiencing communities and ways that will preserve life and make everyone safer.

I think about all of my students who were math-phobic, who didn't believe they could learn math, who didn't understand, who didn't think they were smart enough, and by the end, they understood that they already had the gifts, and my job was to help them access them, and I believe that.