There was always resistance and there was always a counter-narrative, but we were told all through the early twentieth century that black people in the South don't want an education, they don't want to vote, they're simple people, they don't want this, they don't want that.

When someone who's always been in your life is gone, it's a stunning adjustment of your own identity.

Teaching has always been, for me, linked to issues of social justice. I've never considered it a neutral or passive profession.

I know that's a little jarring, coming from a Weatherman, but what I mean by being humble is doubting if your action did anything. So you have to open your eyes, act and doubt. And then you have to repeat for a lifetime.

I would say when I went to Michigan. It started. I got very very involved in civil rights in Ann Harbor right away. Picketing, something I never even knew existed.

Now teach-ins are fairly common or they become common place. But in 1965, the Students for Democratic Society in Ann Harbor organized the first teach-in. The way it happened was that we were advocating for a strike that we advocated that the faculty should strike in solidarity with the Vietnamese struggle.

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?