[James] Baldwin is needed even more today because he helps you focus to the essential, to what is important.

Your tweet is as important as if you would have written a Ph.D. [dissertation] on the subject.

Over the years, he disappeared - like a lot of our leaders disappear. [James Baldwin] was not assassinated, but somehow he went through those assassinations as if it was himself. I think that broke him as well.

[James] Baldwin was a celebrity. A TV show like Kenneth Clark could put him aside of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. He was, at least, one of the three most important spokesmen of the movement and of the black community.

From a young age, [James Baldwin] was watching all those different films. He's watching John Wayne killing off the Indians. He came to the point that the Indians were him. You had to educate yourself because the movies were not educating you. The movies were giving you a reflection of you that was not the truth. That's the trick. The movie was also giving a reflection of what the country is. Basically, a country that wanted itself to be innocent. That's the ambivalence of Hollywood.

Just try to be yourself and resist complacency and ignorance. All you can do is work, work; work and be disciplined.

Today, I don't even think that people like [James Baldwin] are possible. He would not have that much room.