“I left the South in 1963 and was living in Morristown, New Jersey, when the March on Washington took place, so I watched it on television instead.”

A lot has changed since I grew up, but there’s still a long way to go. I don’t think we can move forward with Donald Trump as the president. There’s a disconnect there. We don’t want to regress, we want progress.

That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person.

As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.

When our founding fathers drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, black people weren’t even considered human.

A lot of African American women wanted to emulate white women. But I said in my mind, rationally thinking, there is no way you are going to get your hair that straight, especially in the summer.

When I told my mother I was pregnant, I thought she was going to have a heart attack.

I was about four years old the first time I ever saw what happened when you acted up to whites.

There were many African Americans – many, many stories similar to my story.

I lost most of my friends. Their parents had told them to stay away from me, because they said I was crazy, I was an extremist.

The light-skinned girls always thought they were better looking. So did the teachers, too. That meant most of the dark complexion ones didn’t like themselves.

There was segregation everywhere. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn’t even go into the same restaurants.

Being dragged off that bus was worth it just to see Barack Obama become president, because so many others gave their lives and didn’t get to see it, and I thank God for letting me see it.

When you’ve been abused daily and you see people humiliated and harassed, you just get tired of it.

New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama.

I’d like my grandchildren to be able to see that their grandmother stood up for something, a long time ago.

Rosa Parks wasn’t the first one to rebel against the segregated seats. I was the first one.

People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead.

Embrace your past, but live for now.

Live a life worth remembering.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Every day is different, and some days are better than others, but no matter how challenging the day, I get up and live it.

A lie cannot live.

Fears, even the most basic ones, can totally destroy our ambitions. Fear, if left unchecked, can destroy our lives. Fear is one of the many enemies lurking inside us.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.