For Black people, we're one of the only groups of people that for some reason to express love of yourself, in some ways, is misconstrued as a dislike for someone else.

I think that when the education system started to be dismantled during the first Great Depression in the 1930s, we didn't recover from that.

When you study our greatest artists, you will find that they give us a key to understand how to deal with each other, and that our bloodlines are intertwined. It's not hyphenated America. That there is an America, and it is expressed in those arts. It gives us a key to figure out how to negotiate with each other, and it tells us actually who we are.

Who creates a thing is not as important as what the thing is. Who created baseball? Who created basketball? Who created the space program? Who created - we could go on and on. We could argue about who created something. We all are participants in it.

Jazz comes from our way of life, and because it's our national art form, it helps us to understand who we are.

The first jazz musician was a trumpeter, Buddy Bolden, and the last will be a trumpeter, the archangel Gabriel.

It was Dr. King's tireless activism that fostered our modern way of relating to one another.