My mother and father and many of my relatives had been sharecroppers.

If someone had told me in 1963 that one day I would be in Congress, I would have said, 'You're crazy. You don't know what you're talking about.'

No one can say that this was the decisive and [Russians hacking ] was what elected [Donald] Trump, but clearly his behavior during the campaign in terms of what he said in the week or two before the election was unacceptable.

Some people think that [it was] Martin Luther King Jr.'s idea to have a boycott. It was a black woman, a teacher, who said we should boycott the buses. You had people like Fannie Lou Hamer; Delta, Mississippi.

You cannot give up - you have to be persistent and keep pushing, and press on.

I truly believe that one day we will get there, we will arrive. And if we do it right in America, maybe, just maybe, we can serve as a model for the rest of the world.

The reward for playing jazz is playing jazz.