When I look in the mirror I see someone who's aging now, and someone who kept a commitment made many, many years ago, and who today is trying to be an example for young women.

The traditional farm, the peanuts, the cotton, the corn, is probably not the thing to do, because you're up against big farmers who can afford all the equipment to grow those kinds of crops. But we need healthy food. We're being encouraged to eat more vegetables. Our school systems are being encouraged to buy locally. So, we need farmers who can produce that food.

You can't give up. Sometimes you get knocked down, but you have to get back up, fighting. You have to think about the others who come behind you as well. And you have to think of the example that you set for others.

I grew up on a farm and, prior to my father's murder, I wanted to get away from the farm, and away from South Georgia where the Jim Crow laws absolutely controlled anything and everything we did. So, my goal was to leave once I completed high school. But on the night of my father's murder, I made a commitment that I would not leave the South, that I would stay and devote my life to working for change. So, my father's murder has shaped the course of my life even up to this very day.

I love helping other people. When I made a commitment to stay in the South, to work for change, it meant devoting my life to working for and helping others. I feel good when I know that I've saved someone's farm, or helped a family to get a home or access to credit. Or when I can get young people to see that there's more to life than just trying to make the biggest dollar for yourself.

Given the way the system was, what could I do as I one person, other than devote my life to fighting to make it different? If I had allowed myself to be filled with hate, I probably wouldn't even be alive, because that hate could've killed me. That hate would've blinded me to my contributions in terms of how I could make a difference. You can't think straight when you're consumed by hate and focused on destroying someone else. Instead, I was bent on trying to destroy a system that was not fair to all of us, and I continue to do that.

I wish that somehow, some way we could learn to live together in this country.