I understood that my family was rich in love but would probably never own the land my father, John, dreamed of owning. My mother, Willie Ella Mays Clarke, was a washerwoman for poor white folks in the area of Columbus, Georgia where the writer Carson McCullers once lived.

Europeans not only colonized most of the world, they colonized information about the world.

I have walked majestically with kings and queens and presidents and other heads of states.

There's such a craving to make Egypt white or Asian, people don't just even listen to you. When you explain why would anyone build anything as enduring as the Pyramids in Africa before they would build anything of that nature at home?

My mother really held the family together. She was a perfect example of the kind of black woman I would love to see again. She ruled my father with an iron hand, yet she barely ever raised her voice above a whisper.

If people do not know where they have been and what they have been they don't know what they are. They don't know where they going to have to go or where they still have to be.

We will have taken one giant step forward when we face this reality: Powerful people never teach powerless people how to take their power away from them.