It's a misconception to believe that the resistance ended with the civil rights movement.

I was a member of the Black Student Union, part of the central committee at San Francisco State. During the 1968 strike there, I was certainly very much involved in the activities that occurred on campus. It was part of an extraordinary period in my life

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.

I remember when Langston Hughes used to write a column in black newspapers around this character Jesse B. Semple. He always used that as a voice, sometimes in comic ways, of having everyday people's voice come through this common folk hero, who was an ordinary working guy. He would talk about anything from police brutality to the Korean War. Those kinds of expression and identification are no longer prevalent in our popular culture.

In The Black Power Mixtape , you hear the voice of Angela Davis - not someone playing Angela Davis.

My theatrical background was in the great work of the South African playwright Athol Fugard.

What he [Barack Obama] does to change the world - that's what's important.