Identity has several parts, and the self needs to expand. Black youth should be encouraged to have as many parts or as rich an identity as possible. It's a form of allowing them to be curious about the world.

I can see criticizing, complaining, protesting - anything but choosing not to vote. Too many people died for us not to vote.

What happened after World War I was disgraceful. Most veterans, like my great-uncle, were squashed back into place. Congress couldn't pass an anti-lynching bill. The World War II generation, though, wasn't going to take it.

The point of Berlin was that it seemed that only people like you ran the city. You never ran into people who weren't like you - especially when you lived as that kind of American in Berlin connected to the arts.

Economic justice is not just something blacks are crying out for; whites are desperate for it, too. But in the public imagination, the face of poverty is black. In all actuality, the face of poverty is white.

The hardest thing about Berlin is letting it belong to other people.

I think that the Vietnam War era is important because we tend not to want to revisit it. For black people, there was the temptation of disaffection. People looked for alternative ways to express themselves personally and politically, people doubted the system, and there was the terrible kind of division in black America between a radical leadership and a much older, compromising leadership.