I never had an occasion to question color, therefore, I only saw myself as what I was... a human being.

I want my great-granddaughter to have a fairly good understanding of the world in which I lived for 81 years and also the world before I came into it - all the way back a hundred thousand years, to the beginning of our species.

I was the only Black person on the set. It was unusual for me to be in a circumstance in which every move I made was tantamount to representation of 18 million people.

My father was a tomato farmer. There is the phrase that says he or she worked their fingers to the bone, well, that's my dad. And he was a very good man.

My father was very big on marriage.

We're all imperfect, and life is simply a perpetual, unending struggle against those imperfections.

I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida.