If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change.

In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.

The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience.

The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of the saints are black.

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.

Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large.

Negative thinking, by definition, is in opposition to goals and positive motion forward.

The good things you do for others when nobody sees you make you a real star in the sky, a shining noble star beyond reach!

One thing I've come to learn about myself is that I have to keep going.

What if we knew what tomorrow would bring? Would we fix it? Could we?

Don't look for miracles. You yourself are the miracle.

Poems' deep work is a matter of language, but also a matter of life. One part of that work is to draw into our awareness and into language itself the unobvious and the unexpected.

Sometimes consciousness devises an obstacle in order to have the experience of transcending it.

I want to feel secure personally. Have a competitive team out there -- I really want to win; I hate losing -- and, I guess, I want to be treated like a normal person.

I think that at the end of the day, when people understand the circumstances that led to the circumstances, they begin to sway their views.

I went to eight different schools my first nine years of school.