It was the Democratic Party, it was the Presidential election. We elected a president [Barack Obama]; we didn't elect a king. So all the speculation in the next three months - people camped out at his house, and wondering who's coming to visit, who's going to be the Secretary of State - that all struck me as inane and stupid.

It's not Lyndon Johnson who makes the black freedom movement; it's the black freedom movement who makes Lyndon Johnson.

Hating war in Vietnam in 1965 was minority position.

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.

What were the politics of my family? They were mainstream moderate politics.

Students for a Democratic Society was also affiliated with the civil rights movement everywhere.

I would say for the young: Don't be straight jacketed by ideology. Don't be driven by a structure of ideas.