I found the place where I was beaten bloody forty years earlier and dragged to jail and that made me cry. When the family came out, that made me cry, and the reason I had a hard time leaving Grant Park was that to see a million people like that, feeling the way that million people felt, was so exhilarating.

I see [Lyndon] Johnson as the war in Vietnam, and the invasion of the Dominican Republic and so on. So I'm not a liberal in that sense, because i think of liberals as part of that establishment.

That's in the nature of social change. So you can analyze what didn't work, but it's very hard to predict what will work.

It was Frederick Douglass, John Brown, Harriet Tubman, Wendell Phillips - these were the people who made abolition real. Now, none of you guys is in favor of slavery, right?

In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we're told these guys are lazy, they're uneducated, they don't care, they don't have any political instincts - just like the working class in America, apparently - and then suddenly what the hell happened? What was that? They changed the world by changing themselves. Now is that over? No. Is the civil rights movement over? No. These movements have not accomplished what they set out to accomplish.

If you were against slavery in 1840 and a white person, you would have been against the law, the Bible, your church, your pastor, your parents, common sense, tradition, everything. You would have been against everything.

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.