Wherever I found resistance to oppression, whether in Africa, in Latin America, certainly here in America in the South, I joined that resistance. I took part in the labor movement, in social movements, in the church community. I felt that it was the honorable thing to do and still do.

Do not submit. It is extremely critical that repression be met full head-on and that it be resisted with every fiber in our being. There is just absolutely no compromise that can be made with it.

I delighted in the music of Africa, the earliest of the slave plantation songs, the transformation into Christianity and all that Christianity brought to the lives of the Africans who were forced to come to America.

Since I have escaped the harshness of the economic bounds of poverty, I have stayed very connected to it spiritually. I reside and live and go and socialize and exist among those who suffer daily from the relationship that they have to poverty, Black men and women who are incarcerated. Actually, all people who are incarcerated, not just Black.

I think America offers a dream that cannot be fulfilled as easily anywhere else in the world as it could be fulfilled here. Although oppression was common to all of us, those styles of oppression gave us the opportunity to see the world in dimensions we didn't quite see growing up in any one place.

If you believe in justice, if you believe in democracy, if you believe in people's rights, if you believe in the harmony of all humankind - then you have no choice but to back Fidel Castro as long as it takes!

I not only think that they (U.S. leaders) are misguided, but I think they know exactly what they are doing and I think that they are men who are possessed of evil.