My people were homesteading in Colorado before Emancipation.

Women are allowed more freedoms and we're fighting for more freedoms, we're experiencing more freedoms won.

Coming from the '50s, things were very violent. We were still being lynched. If I drove down through the South with my mother, I might not make it through one state without being bullied or harassed. I feel like unless you've been black for a week, you don't know.

I tell actresses, "If you're too tall, if you're too fat, you're not going to work. I don't care how talented you are." It's a business, and sex sells.

Me and my sisters were taught that if our eyes worked and our legs worked, we were beautiful. We had so many kids in our family that if we all got in front of the mirror and were ashamed of browns and golds and yellows and whites, and we believed what society told us - that the darker people were less attractive and the lighter ones were prettier - we would have had sibling murders. My family, being half-rural and half-military, just came from a different place.

But I just loved looking at the clothes of the '70s.

I'm just going to try to do the best work at whatever I'm going to be, and I don't think I'm going to be an actress.