“We were churchgoing people.”

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.

I sleep when the sleep comes down on me.

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.

There is nothing more uncommon than common sense.

Self-actualized people…live more in the real world of nature than in the man-made mass of concepts, abstractions, expectations, beliefs and stereotypes that most people confuse with the world.

So eager are our people to obliterate the present.

What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.

We believe strongly that the road to peace and two states living side by side does not go through New York, it goes through Jerusalem and Ramallah.

White magic is black magic. A less than perfect meddling in the spiritual world can breed monsters for other people, and demons used for good can hang around and make mischief afterwards.

Whenever fortune wishes to joke, she lifts people from what is humble to the highest extremity of affairs.

Be the reason someone smiles. Be the reason someone feels loved and believes in the goodness in people.