If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.

Some of these things I saw in foreign films - African films, Cuban films - long before I decided to really go on this course as an actor. I started to think about what values I saw in those films that I wanted to bring to my projects

I never thought about being an actor. I was just going to play music and baseball. That’s all I was going to do. To this day, that’s what I do. I just added movies to it.

If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.

You have this response of angry young people, with a war going on in Vietnam, a poverty program that was insufficient, and police brutality.

In 1967, the students at San Francisco State invited the poet Amiri Baraka to the campus for a semester. He attracted other influential black writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Eldridge Cleaver. What emerged was something we called the community communications program. That's how I got involved; I got involved in a little play

It is the most painful thing to see how young children become collateral damage of wars, but when peace treaties are signed landmines do not respect any of these accords. And as long as these silent killers linger after wars, children will never know peace