The legacy I want to leave is a child-care system that says that no kid is going to be left alone or left unsafe.

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.

I grew up in a very religious family and it is the motivating force to every thing I do. I am fortunate to have had adults all around me who really lived their faith, in helping other people and doing the best you can do. The world wasn't so wonderful back then, with segregated rule in the South. But we were never hopeless and we never despaired because we had adults out there struggling with us, being there for us, and buffering us.

History does not pose problems without eventually producing the solutions.

We're spending, on average, three times more for prison than for public-school pupils. That's the dumbest investment policy. It doesn't make us safer.

When I fight about what is going on in the neighborhood, or when I fight about what is happening to other people’s children, I’m doing that because I want to leave a community and a world that is better than the one I found.

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.