I learned that if you bring black people together, you bring them together with a song. To this day, I don't understand how people think they can bring anybody together without a song.
When donors visited the Black Panther Party, they came and saw our real programs, a real clinic, with real doctors and medics, giving service to people.
Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of colour about him anywhere.
I wear the same black suit. I have five of them. I pair them with a red scarf. I was wearing a red scarf when I won the first architectural competition of my career.
I haven't done a lot of things in my career that my kids can watch, because they are 8, 6 and 3, and they are pretty young; so given the concepts that the film was about a superhero, it was a black superhero, and it was a father and son type partners...
In the same way that Occupy Wall Street forever elevated that concept of income inequality, the Black Lives Matter protesters have elevated the idea of inequity in policing as it relates to minority communities.
My boyfriend's idea of a lesson was to take me on a black diamond run in the middle of a hail storm and say, 'Go!' Ski patrol had to escort me to another lift to get me down the mountain. No, that wasn't humiliating, not at all.
People from major labels were afraid to go to Black Flag gigs throughout most of the band's existence. They treated our gigs as something threatening. I'm sure that it probably was. They probably had reasons to be scared.
There's no white comic that sells tickets to black people like me. They're going to get their hair done, get a new outfit, and come out to see a white dude.
It was night and I could see a large and calm lake, reflecting the moon. Black mountains rose around it. I arrived from between two of these mountains, I looked at the lake and the moon, and that was it, nothing else happened.
Even before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton threw their exploratory committees into the ring, every reporter seemed to be asking, 'Which candidate are Americans more ready for: a white woman or a black man?'
I've always seen My Chemical Romance as the band that would have represented who me and my friends were in high school, and the band that we didn't have to represent us - the kids that wore black - back then.
Finally, slowly, drippingly, degrade the term Choice down to its most meager means: The red car not the black one. The 9:25 showing, not the 7:15. Ritz not Wheat Thins.
I never thought we'd ever have a black president. President Obama has done such a tremendous job... He just has been unable to get what he needs to be moved at the level it should be moved.
For me... you know, the most I've paid for a haircut was in Australia. Usually I go to a black barber or a Latino barber. I can't just go into Supercuts.
Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.
Well, we think the broadcasts did have some effect, because we see the antiwar movement in the U.S. building up, growing and so we think that our broadcast is a support to this antiwar movement.
Eyes is the attempt to tell the story of the Civil Rights movement and to create an emotional, intellectual constituency. But what do you do after that? The black community doesn't have institutions that pick up such moments and preserve them.
Washington is the only city in the world where you can go to a black-tie dinner and there at the foot of the table is a television set up to catch a press conference.
It is very annoying - things have been written by people who didn't know me at all or Princess Diana. They were written by people who never knew me or met me. It did make me angry. I just stopped reading the papers.
It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.
