It's clear that he was incredibly courageous in his critique of white supremacy, wealth inequality, and imperial power as it relates to war in particular. But it's easy to deodorize Martin King, to sanitize or sterilize him. And I simply want to reveal his radical love and his radical analysis as what they really were.

If the Kingdom of God is in you, you should leave a little bit of heaven wherever you go.

I just don't want the fear from the right to be used by the [Barack] Obama administration to silence critics. We have to be willing to tell the truth because we're trying to speak about conditions that are being rendered invisible in our prisons and schools in the hood and so forth and so on.

The American Dream is individualistic. Martin Luther King's dream was collective. The American Dream says, "I can engage in upward mobility and live the good life." King's dream was fundamentally Christian. His commitment to radical love had everything to do with his commitment to Jesus of Nazareth, and his dream had everything to do with community, with a "we" consciousness that included poor and working people around the world, not just black people.

The need of black conservatives to gain the respect of their white peers deeply shapes certain elements of their conservatism. In this regard, they simply want what most people want, to be judged by the quality of their skills, not by the color of their skin. But the black conservatives overlook the fact that affirmative action policies were political responses to the pervasive refusal of most white Americans to judge black Americans on that basis.

Part of the problem is we had so far to go, given the deep homophobia in our society. But, the movement is very real. The movement is very real.

Cincinnati like so many other cities, we know that so many of our schools, when it comes to public schools, are still de facto segregated racially. It has to do with residential segregation. It has to do with James Crow, Jr., which is at work, de facto rather than legally so that some of the integration is taking place among more and more well-to-do.