I was treated much better in Africa than I was treated in America. And you see, often I get letters like this: "Go back to Africa."

We worked all the time, just worked and then we would be hungry and my mother was clearing up a new ground trying to help feed us for $1.25 a day. She was using an axe, just like a man, and something flew up and hit her in her eye. It eventually caused her to lose both of her eyes and I began to get sicker and sicker of the system there. I used to see my mother wear clothes that would have so many patches on them, they had been done over and over and over again. She would do that but she would try to keep us decent.

When I liberate others, I liberate myself.

If this is a Great Society, I'd hate to see a bad one.

I went almost naked to see that my mother was kept decent and treated as a human being for the first time in all of her life.

You don't have to like everybody, but you have to love everybody.

All of this is on account we want to register [sic], to become first-class citizens, and if the Freedom Democratic Party is not seated now, I question America. Is this America, the land of the free and the home of the brave where we have to sleep with our telephones off the hooks because our lives be threatened daily because we want to live as decent human beings - in America?