“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.”

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.

We were churchgoing people.

Life is for the living. Death is for the dead. Let life be like music. And death a note unsaid.

Just one living cell in the human body is, more complex than New York City.

Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove, That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields.

We live in the best of all possible worlds.

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.

One of the characteristics of the dream is that nothing surprises us in it. With no regret, we agree to live in it with strangers, completely cut off from our habits and friends.

Don’t come to me with your troubles. I have to work for my money and you are young enough to work too. If you can’t make enough money to live on you can jump out of the window or drown yourself.

Woe to the man that first did teach the cursed steel to bite in his own flesh, and make way to the living spirit!