Miles Davis was a master. In every phase of his career, he understood that this music was a tribute to the African muse.

I'm always imagining some sort of story behind the song, even the ones I haven't written. I'm actively engaging in playacting.

My father had all kinds of instruments in the house that he would hide from my mother. He bought them through mail order!

There was a train that would come by our house every night, and I'd hear the whistle blow. That is the sweetest memory I have.

Miles Davis was doing something inherently African, something that has to do with all forms of American music, not just jazz.

I'm always looking for ways to develop as an artist, especially as a jazz artist-to find different ways of testing my voice.

I've often cringed when I heard myself described as a jazz singer. I've always thought of myself as a jazz vocalist.

My grandmother sang, too, and she was really loud. It was this wild kind of singing. I count her among my influences.

Everything I do is collaborative. It's just my way. I'm really very interested in how the other musicians perceive the song.

Miles Davis was a master. In every phase of his career, he understood that this music was a tribute to the African muse.

Being black, I'm involved in the reparations movement. It's focused toward the African-American audience. We could begin to heal.

I was never interested in singing in the church choir or in school. I was more interested in becoming a musician.

To be a slaveholder meant one had to regard the African American as inferior in every way.

There is no way that we know what is going on between the African American and the Asian American. We don't understand what an Indigenous American is. We don't understand what a Latino American is.

Without Social Security, poverty rates for African American seniors would more than double.

It's a pity one can't imagine what one can't compare to anything. Genius is an African who dreams up snow.

It is up to African leaders to show their will and political courage in order to assure that this new pan-African institution becomes an efficient instrument and not a place for endless discussions.

Because I don't play guitar any more, African harmonies and rhythms have been an inspiration to me. I love the raw origin of the sound. It complements my voice and words naturally.

I say that I represent this movement because my intellectual allegiances are clearly European, not African.

I have a very personal interest. I am a Miami-Dade voter. One of the issues is that my vote and so many other votes of women and African Americans in Florida are being discounted or discarded. I want my vote to count.

Historically Black Colleges and Universities, or HBCUs, have played an important role in enriching the lives of not just African Americans, but our entire country.

When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life. Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor.

I think one of the political problems we have in this country is the perspective that all soccer moms think alike, all African-Americans think alike.

The adoring crowds and overwhelming Democratic support in the 2008 election was based largely on joy at jettisoning Bush and the appeal of electing a superbly qualified charismatic African American leader.

My parents shared not only an improbable love, they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name, Barack, or blessed, believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

Eight generations of African-Americans are still waiting to achieve their rights - compensation and restitution for the hundreds of years during which they were bought and sold on the market.

An important aspect of the current situation is the strong social reaction against suggestions that the home language of African American children be used in the first steps of learning to read and write.

A genocide in Africa has not received the same attention that genocide in Europe or genocide in Turkey or genocide in other part of the world. There is still this kind of basic discrimination against the African people and the African problems.

Whether or not all this came to pass in an East African ditch, I wouldn't like to say. Perhaps it happened in North Africa or further west, but Africa was definitely the place.

I don't think people have been able to deal with the fact that African American filmmakers can make movies about life and relationships.

In the final analysis, the whole cause of world revolution hinges on the revolutionary struggles of the Asian, African and Latin American people who make up the overwhelming majority of the world's population.

What we call soul has been around a long time. It comes out of a particular culture that is African in origin, but influenced by 250 years of slavery, as well as other forms of racial oppression.

From the time of independences until the end of the Cold War, in spite of the participation of a considerable number of African states in the non-aligned movement, everyone in fact chose to align with one or another of the two major blocks.

Sports and entertainment have always been windows of opportunity for African Americans, when other doors were closed.

Nowadays, people always say, how come he's doing such young shows? But they never mention The Mod Squad. I was very proud of that show. It's the first time an African-American guy kissed a white girl.

My son Wesley has just turned 13. He was 12 during the recording of this record and he is quite a drummer already and has been studying drums since he was four, but he's also very interested in African percussion and studies percussion.

At the same, we need to remain sensitive to the reality that we are still an African society in which the majority of the people and communities live under severe deprivations and afflictions that are no fault of theirs.

I concentrate on the southern African subcontinent.

Seriously though, my father was the first African American to sign a contract with the Metropolitan Opera so I grew up with classical music and jazz in the home all the time.

Most African Americans, especially the men and women from my generation, would accept the nationalist gambit that says only European Americans can be racists, which is an interesting gambit.

I have strong views about South African politics and I still don't feel I need to make public statements.

We need somebody who's got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it's like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it's like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old - and that's the criterion by which I'll be selecting my judges.

The highest percentage of African Americans own their own homes today than ever in our nation's history.

It appears that the present-day form of African American English is not the inheritance of the period of slavery, but the creation of the second half of the 20th century.

Epidemics historically have tended to kill the very young and the very old, but AIDS is different: Those ages 20 to 40 are most affected, which means that so far over 12 million African children have been orphaned because of AIDS.

People have been killing because of racial differences since the time of Adam and Eve, but in this country racism has been primarily aimed at African Americans.

As much as everyone wants to downplay racism, it exists. There's a great mistrust among some African-Americans of white people.

I was able to do To Sleep with Anger, a very powerful film about African Americans, their spirituality, and the things that happened within a small community and a family.