The Reward For Playing Jazz Is Playing

My Parents Told Me In The Very Beginning As A Young Child When I Raised The Question About Segregation And Racial Discrimination, They Told Me Not To Get In The Way, Not To Get In Trouble, Not To Make Any Noise.

The Book Martin Luther King And The Montgomery Story, I Read It When I Was About 17-and-a-half Or 18. It Changed My Life.

First Time I Got Arrested, I Knew Somehow And Some Way, We Would Succeed. To Go On The Freedom Ride To Be Beaten And Left Bloody And Unconscious, To Be Beaten On That Bridge In Selma, Have A Concussion - I Thought That I Was Going To Die On That Bridge. But Somehow And Some Way, I Lived To Tell About What Happened, And I've Seen Some Of The Fruits Of The Labor Of So Many People, And People Must Understand That.

We Have So Many Issues Today That We Need To Confront. Comprehensive Immigration Reform. We Have To Solve The Issue Of Poverty, The Issue Of Hunger, The Issue Of War - Spending Billions Of Dollars To Kill Rather Than To Build. We Have To Deal With The Fact That All Of Our Children Should Be Receiving The Best Possible Education.

The Civil Rights Movement Was Based On Faith. Many Of Us Who Were Participants In This Movement Saw Our Involvement As An Extension Of Our Faith. We Saw Ourselves Doing The Work Of The Almighty. Segregation And Racial Discrimination Were Not In Keeping With Our Faith, So We Had To Do Something.