We live in a country where we're supposed to have freedom of the press and religious freedom, but I think to some degree, there's a sense of fear in America today, that if you say the wrong thing, what some people will consider what is wrong, if you step out of line, if you dissent, whether you be an entertainer, that somehow and some way this government or the forces to be will come down on you.

Today, all across this country there are going to be rallies led by Democrats and others to fight against the devastating impact of repeal of the Affordable Care Act. 20 million people thrown off of health insurance, prescription drug prices raising for seniors, privatization of Medicare: devastation. And we've got to fight back against that.

The advent of the civil rights movement during the 50s and 60s made it very plain crystal clear to me that we had an obligation to do what we could to make real the Constitution of the United States of America.

When I was 15 years old in the tenth grade, I heard Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at the time. As I got more and more involved, I saw politics as a means of bringing about change

I remember being at the church a few hours after the church was bombed in Birmingham, the 16th Street Baptist Church. It was very hard and very difficult to stand on that corner across the street from the church. Or to go Mississippi and search for the three civil rights workers who came up missing. There is a lot of trauma.

As a young child, it became crystal clear to me that there were certain rights and privileges that other people had that my mother, my father, my grandparents, my great grandparents didn't have - that it was an ongoing struggle to realize the dream of the 14th and 15th Amendment.

I would like to think that we have made much more progress, that we've come much further, to have someone like a Donald Trump to emerge as the nominee of a major political party.