From a September 23, 2020 Orange County Regional History Center Oral History with Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings, “You have to be a bit of a realist in these processes where, no matter what you think, you won’t be able to make all the changes that need to be made in days, months. It will be decades of being in the fight. So I have been doing this now for four decades.”
“I know what I know about this. I’ve been in this fight for decades. I haven’t been sitting as a spectator in the arena. I’ve been in the arena.”
“So that is what I say to young people, ‘you want to really bring about change, you need to become the prosecutors, the defense attorneys, the judges, the police officers, the school teachers, the doctors, the professors in college, the researchers, the entrepreneurs. You need to become all of those if you really want to bring about change.’ ”
“Otherwise they are going to be frustrated if they think that, it is going too happen like that, They are going to be so frustrated. I think that is what we see. Sometimes when you see the violence, the destruction, it is frustration manifesting itself. Because they really don’t understand what the fight is at this point.”