You never cared enough to be Black

I don't think people in power have the potential to do anything like that to me. I feel as though as long as our music is available, folks are going to hear it.

I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem.

Nobody can do everything, but everybody can do something.

I learnt early on that your audience take the songs in the way they want to rather than the way you might want them too.

You see Martin Luther King is dead and Huey Newton is not. And Malcolm X is dead and Bobby Seale is not. And Vernon Jordan was shot. The thing that revolutionaries, or even people who want to claim they're revolutionaries, often forget is that it doesn't make no difference what kind of wardrobe you wear, and if you speak up about Black people doing better you just risked your life.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.