Unless children have strong education and strong families and strong communities and decent housing, it's not enough to go sit in at a lunch counter.

The literacy level at Mississippi prisons? Fifth grade. Can't read, what are you going to do? If you've got a conviction rap, what are you going to do? It's a real crisis.

No person has the right to rain on your dreams.

Be a good ancestor. Stand for something bigger than yourself. Add value to the Earth during your sojourn.

You didn't have a choice about the parents you inherited, but you do have a choice about the kind of parent you will be.

As [Martin Luther] King said, it never cost anybody a dime to integrate the lunch counters. When you start talking about trying to deal with jobs and hunger and things that require investment, then that's really the tough stuff, because everybody wants to do right if it doesn't cost them anything.

[Rosa Louise] Parks used to say, "Everybody looks at me because I sat down once in Montgomery, but the real hero is a woman named Septima Clark."She created the Citizenship Schools [where civil-rights activists taught basic literacy and political education classes].