I'm not quite sure precisely when social and political activism became a visible brand of my DNA, but it seems to me that I was born into it. It is hard to be born into the experience in the world of poverty and not develop some instinct for survival and resistance to those things that oppress you.
My activism always existed. My art gave me the platform to do something about the activism.
Our foreign policy has made a wreck of this planet. I'm always in Africa... And when I go to these places I see American policy written on the walls of oppression everywhere.
John Steinbeck is one of the most under-discussed and under-written-about of all American writers. He is way up there and should stand on a par, or even above, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
I've always been supportive of the right of Israel as a state, and I've always fought against anti-Semitism, even in my own community.
I grew up in the Great Depression, and the jazz artists and Dixieland musicians were at the core of our communications and enjoyment. They were not passing fancies. They are something that is, and will be, listened to again and again. I have a space of reverence for some of those old jazz stars such as Sydney Bechet and Louis Armstrong.
You can cage the singer but not the song.
If you believe in justice, if you believe in democracy, if you believe in people's rights, if you believe in the harmony of all humankind - then you have no choice but to back Fidel Castro as long as it takes!
I knew Charlie Parker, and he gave us such a gift with his music. He put so much into so little space, and it was tragic that he died so young.
I call President Bush a terrorist. I call those around him terrorists as well: Condoleezza Rice, Rumsfeld, Gonzales in the Justice Department, and certainly Cheney.
All too often, I'm sorry to say, I relegated my family to the cracks and margins.
Although slavery may have been abolished, the crippling poison of racism still persists, and the struggle still continues.
I think New York City most represents what it is that America in general aspires to. It's big; it's dense. I've known this city from all of its social arcs. The best that's in America is yet to come. The worst that's in America is yet to come.
Poverty is terror. Having your Social Security threatened is terror. Having your livelihood as an elderly person slowly disappearing with no replenishment is terror.
Bring it on. Dissent is central to any democracy.
Without the rebellious heart, without people who understand that there's no sacrifice we can make that is too great to retrieve that which we've lost, we will forever be distracted with possessions and trinkets and title.
Fascism is fascism. Terrorism is terrorism. Oppression is oppression.
America has never been moved to perfect our desire for greater democracy without radical thinking and radical voices being at the helm of any such quest.
If you want to look at the Monroe Doctrine and what happened when we wrote that, we stated what the business would be for America's power, especially in this hemisphere. We have always been the colonizer of this hemisphere, wherever we've been.
The Ku Klux Klan, for some of us, is a constant - has a constant existence. It isn't until it touches certain aspects of white America that white America all of the sudden wakes up to the fact that there is something called the Klan and that it does its mischief.
