Amidst protestations of 'Who can be against the children?' too few people are FOR children when it really matters.

You can't be what you can't see.

The legacies that parents and church and teachers left to my generation of Black children were priceless but not material: a living faith reflected in daily service, the discipline of hard work and stick-to-itiveness, and a capacity to struggle in the face of adversity.

If it's wrong for 13-year-old inner-city girls to have babies without the benefit of marriage, it's wrong for rich celebrities, and we ought to stop putting them on the cover of People magazine.

Investing in [children] is not a national luxury or a national choice. It's a national necessity. If the foundation of your house is crumbling, you don't say you can't afford to fix it while you're building astronomically expensive fences to protect it from outside enemies. The issue is not are we going to pay - it's are we going to pay now, up front, or are we going to pay a whole lot more later on.

I wasn't thinking about history. I was thinking about how we were going to end segregation at lunch counters in Atlanta, Georgia.We would have never thought about making history, we just thought: Here is our chance to get out our sense of rejection at this kind of racial discrimination. I don't know that there was a time that anybody growing up in the South wasn't enraged about being segregated and being discriminated against.

Education remains one of the black community's most enduring values. It is sustained by the belief that freedom and education go hand in hand, that learning and training are essential to economic quality and independence.