The nationwide push for equality in the Sixties is still impacting how we live today
T here was a lot going on in the late-Sixties and Seventies. I was very involved, doing a lot of marching. There was a lot of inequality, and it needed to be fixed. I’ve always been one for love, honesty, and kindness. Fairness. All of these things still mean a great deal to me, as much as they did when I was a kid. Growing up in Chicago, I was engulfed in all that action that was going on — from Martin Luther King to Farrakhan, everybody who was making sense, I was listening.
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In high school, I worked with the Black Panther Party’s free-breakfast-for-children program. I missed my first three classes every morning feeding kids. And it was wonderful. It was beautiful. It wasn’t necessarily about fighting. It was about believing in equality and self-protection. That’s what all that was about.
People look at anybody who stands up for himself, who says, “No, I’m not taking that crap,” like it’s a kind of insanity. That’s just the way this country thinks. They see revolution as a terrible, frightening word. What it means is change. You have to change things. We came to the conclusion that we have to do it ourselves, for ourselves, because nobody else is interested. We’re still in that place. We take care of ourselves. We take care of our children. We have to look after our own people in a better way.