Both my parents came from North Carolina, in Warren County. My mother had a feeling that there was greater culture in North Carolina than obtained in Norfolk, Virginia, plus the fact she just didn't like the lowland-lying climate there.

I had been friendly with people who were in the Communist party and all the rest of the Left forces, which were oriented in the direction of mass action.

Oppressed people, whatever their level of formal education, have the ability to understand and interpret the world around them, to see the world for what it is, and move to transform it.

I think, to be honest, sort of emanated from the initial work of somebody else instead of SCLC. If you take Albany; I don't know whether you recall how Albany got started. There were two little guys who went up there first. One was Cordell Hull who was then in his teens - not Cordell Hull - Cordell Reagan, who came out of the Nashville movement, and Charles Sherrod, who came out of the Richmond, Virginia, movement.

I had known, number one, that there would never be any role for me in the leadership capacity with SCLC. Why? First, I'm a woman. Also, I'm not a minister. And second, I am a person that feels that I have to maintain some degree of personal integrity and be my own barometer of what is important and what is not.

I think you can find some rationales for that if we look at the background out of which he came. Martin [Luther King] had come out of a highly competitive, black, middle-class background.

Both my parents came from North Carolina, in Warren County. My mother had a feeling that there was greater culture in North Carolina than obtained in Norfolk, Virginia, plus the fact she just didn't like the lowland-lying climate there.