When I Liberate Myself, I Liberate Others.

I Remember, And I Will Never Forget, One Day - I Was Six Years Old And I Was Playing Beside The Road And This Plantation Owner Drove Up To Me And Stopped And Asked Me "could I Pick Some Cotton." I Told Him I Didn't Know And He Said, "yes, You Can. I Will Give You Things That You Want From The Commissary Store," And He Named A Huge List That He Called Off. I Picked The 30 Pounds Of Cotton That Week, But I Found Out What Actually Happened Was He Was Trapping Me Into Beginning The Work I Was To Keep Doing And I Never Did Get Out Of His Debt Again.

We Worked All The Time, Just Worked And Then We Would Be Hungry And My Mother Was Clearing Up A New Ground Trying To Help Feed Us For $1.25 A Day. She Was Using An Axe, Just Like A Man, And Something Flew Up And Hit Her In Her Eye. It Eventually Caused Her To Lose Both Of Her Eyes And I Began To Get Sicker And Sicker Of The System There. I Used To See My Mother Wear Clothes That Would Have So Many Patches On Them, They Had Been Done Over And Over And Over Again. She Would Do That But She Would Try To Keep Us Decent.

... Some Of My People Could Have Been Left [in Africa] And Are Living There. And I Can't Understand Them And They Don't Know Me And I Don't Know Them Because All We Had Was Taken Away From Us. And I Became Kind Of Angry; I Felt The Anger Of Why This Had To Happen To Us. We Were So Stripped And Robbed Of Our Background, We Wind Up With Nothing.

We Didn't Come All The Way Up Here To Compromise For No More Than We’d Gotten Here. We Didn't Come All This Way For No Two Seats, 'cause All Of Us Is Tired.

Actually, Some Of The Things I Experienced As A Child Still Linger On; What The White Man Has Done To The Black People In The South!