You can’t vote against healthcare and call yourself a black man.

If there are occasions when my grape turned into a raisin and my joy bell lost its resonance, please forgive me. Charge it to my head and not to my heart.

Black men of integrity cannot make a deal with a politician and leave out the poor of the nation, all God's children.

When I was a boy we were poor and we had to make do with what we had. So my grandma used to make us quits that we used for blankets. She couldn't afford to go to the store and buy a blanket -- so she'd take scraps of cloth and sew them together. there'd be different colors and different patterns and different types of cloth -- but they all went together to make that big quilt to keep us warm.

So much talent comes from the base of poverty and those in the margins. You limit the base, you miss too much talent.

Urban America has been redlined. Government has not offered tax incentives for investment, as it has in a dozen foreign markets. Banks have redlined it. Industries have moved out, they've redlined it. Clearly, to break up the redlining process, there must be incentives to green-line with hedges against risk.

When they wrote the Constitution, only white male landowners had the right to vote.