I Have The Capacity To Express What

The Civil Rights Movement Didn't Deal With The Issue Of Political Disenfranchisement In The Northern Cities. It Didn't Deal With The Issues That Were Happening In Places Like Detroit, Where There Was A Deep Process Of Deindustrialization Going On. So You Have This Response Of Angry Young People, With A War Going On In Vietnam, A Poverty Program That Was Insufficient, And Police Brutality. All These Things Gave Rise To The Black Power Movement. The Black Power Movement Was Not A Separation From The Civil Rights Movement, But A Continuation Of This Whole Process Of Democratization.

Those Titles, Executive Producer Or Actor, Are Unimportant. I Always Try To Approach My Role As An Artist. The First Thing You Want To Do, That You Attempt To Do As An Artist, Is To Have Some Sort Of Input Into The Material That You Are Working On. That Is How My Process Begins; I Say To Myself: "i Want To Do This Kind Of Work Or I Want To Do That Kind Of Work."

I Never Thought About Being An Actor. I Was Just Going To Play Music And Baseball. That’s All I Was Going To Do. To This Day, That’s What I Do. I Just Added Movies To It.

In 1967, The Students At San Francisco State Invited The Poet Amiri Baraka To The Campus For A Semester. He Attracted Other Influential Black Writers Such As Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Eldridge Cleaver. What Emerged Was Something We Called The Community Communications Program. That's How I Got Involved; I Got Involved In A Little Play

I Didn't Elect [barack] Obama Because He's A Black; I Voted For Obama Because He Was The Right Person At The Time.