I'm a child of the Civil Rights Movement.

I've been a Goodwill Ambassador for the UNICEF and the UNICEF family for more than twelve years.

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.

I'm a child of the Civil Rights Movement.

I've always been able to make choices that don't embarrass me.

I try to find hope in struggle and resistance in small places as much as I can.

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.

One of the main purveyors of violence in this world has been this country.

New Orleans is a city whose basic industry is the service industry. That's why it makes its money. That's - it brings people to the city. People come to the city and experience the wonders of this extraordinary city and everything else. The question is that, how do we create jobs which are the jobs that have pay, that - living wages?

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.

If we look at Houston, which is a very environmentally toxic place, we find that it has one of the highest levels of young men going to prison and also among the highest levels of illiteracy in the country.

But I think it's very key that there's a plan for Haiti. And we have to begin to - as progressives and people who are concerned about Haiti and have been concerned about Haiti, we have to begin to build some sort of consensus, a movement around the Haiti that the Haitians envision.

Well I don't know because I don't have a real relationship with the industry.

Every day of my life I walk with the idea that I am black, no matter how successful I am. And our success is tempered by that; you're successful in this way given the fact you are black, and most blacks don't get to that point.

This country has always been run by elite, and it's an elitist democracy. And that's not a radical concept. It's elitist democracy. When people talk about democracy, they don't talk - really talk about participatory democracy, until the point that we get us at Election Day.

The progressive movement against the war of occupation in Iraq is a reason for hope, as is resistance to free trade agreements in Latin America. Those are moments that we have to celebrate: that people still find the resolve and energy to resist.

What happened to Haiti is a threat that could happen anywhere in the Caribbean to these island nations, you know, because of global warming, because of climate change and all this.

Every day of my life I walk with the idea I am black no matter how successful I am.

You know, we do not want the militarization of Haiti. We do not see a Haitian as a protectorate where it relinquishes its own sovereignty.

It's also important for those who promote those issues within the white community - the somewhat privileged community - to talk about issues affecting people of color.

If we talk about the environment, for example, we have to talk about environmental racism - about the fact that kids in South Central Los Angeles have a third of the lung capacity of kids in Santa Monica.

I'm not so vain as to believe that my involvement changes anything whatsoever.

Freedom Summer, the massive voter education project in Mississippi, was 1964. I graduated from high school in 1965. So becoming active was almost a rite of passage.

If we talk about literacy, we have to talk about how to enhance our children's mastery over the tools needed to live intelligent, creative, and involved lives.

We have to be that wedge that drives the question and asks the hard questions.

I was able to do The Saint of Fort Washington, on the relationship between two homeless men.

Some of these things I saw in foreign films - African films, Cuban films - long before I decided to really go on this course as an actor. I started to think about what values I saw in those films that I wanted to bring to my projects.

But rarely have I made choices that made me feel I was really compromising what I believe.

I never thought about being an actor.

When you've moved past a point where you're just scrambling for jobs, you think about the things that you want to do. And the things that you want to do are governed by what you've seen, what you choose to embrace.

I think the Civil Rights Movement changed that trajectory for me. The first thing I did was leave school. I was suspended for my participation in Movement demonstrations in my hometown, December, 1961.

We support President Truman's civil rights program.

There are those who say to you - we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.

A lot of things happened in a lot of places. And to see how well it was handled in Atlanta. There are a lot of reasons for Atlanta being a special town in the Civil Rights era.

He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. it had to be some silly little Communist.

When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.

Rarely in my 45 years as a civil rights lawyer have I been so angry about an injustice as I am about what happened to Billy Ray Johnson.

I'm a child of the Civil Rights Movement.

By 1962, King had become, by the media's reckoning, the new civil rights leader.

There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights. Dr. King did not stir us to move for our civil rights to have them taken away in these kinds of fashions.

The civil rights movement in the United States was about the same thing, about equality of treatment for all sections of the people, and that is precisely what our movement was about.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.

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.

It is distressing to me that we live in an age in which we still must fight to protect our civil rights as Americans, in which a hate crime perpetrated against someone based their sexual orientation can go unpunished, and in which discrimination is being written into our laws.

Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.

That's what he was saying, the civil rights movement - judge me for my character, not how black my skin is, not how yellow my skin is, how short I am, how tall or fat or thin; It's by my character.

What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.