My loving sister Mary has always shared the pain and pleasure of my heartbeat in a unique and special way. We have sung our sad and warm songs together.

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.

All life is a test one way or the other.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.

What example do you have of anything like the Pyramids outside of Africa? You have them in Mexico, but that can be traced to early African migration. So the African created mound culture.

If we are going to be masters of our destiny, we must be masters of the ideas that influence that destiny.

We 've lost something else: the relationship between men and women.