It Means To Educate Myself Incessantly About

The Neglected Legacy Of The Sixties Is Just This: Unabashed Moral Certitude, And The Purity -- The Incredibly Outgoing Energy -- Of Righteous Rage.

South Africa Used To Seem So Far Away. Then It Came Home To Me. It Began To Signify The Meaning Of White Hatred Here. That Was What The Sheets And The Suits And The Ties Covered Up, Not Very Well. That Was What The Cowardly Guys Calling Me Names From Their Speeding Truck Wanted To Happen To Me, To All Of Me: To My People. That Was What Would Happen To Me If I Walked Around The Corner Into The Wrong Neighborhood. That Was Birmingham. That Was Brooklyn. That Was Reagan. That Was The End Of Reason. South Africa Was How I Came To Understand That I Am Not Against War; I Am Against Losing The War.

Suicide Is Absolute, And If You Think You Will Survive By Hiding Who You Really Are, You Are Sadly Misled: There Is No Such Thing As Partial Or Intermittent Suicide. You Can Only Survive If You - Who You Really Are - Do Survive.

We Need Everybody And All That We Are. We Need To Know And Make Known The Complete, Constantly Unfolding, Complicated Heritage That Is Our Black Experience. We Should Absolutely Resist The Superstar, One At A Time Mentality That Threatens The Varied And Resilient, Flexible Wealth Of Our Black Future.

If Any Of Us Hopes To Survive, She Must Meet The Extremity Of The American Female Condition With Immediate And Political Response. The Thoroughly Destructive And Indefensible Subjugation Of The Majority Of Americans Cannot Continue Except At The Peril Of The Entire Body Politic.