The community put such a premium on success. And you had no excuse to blame racism or discrimination as a reason why you couldn't succeed.

Howard is still a great school. But many of the great faculty members that would be at Howard today are now at Harvard and Yale and Princeton. All this comes as a consequence of affirmative action and the admissions policies that encouraged blacks to enroll in the Ivy League schools.

I never heard people speak about segregation as some great cross that they were bearing. They just went on about their lives. Some of them had good contacts with white people that they were serving in someone's home. Sometimes those white families almost effectively adopted you.

I mean, you're talking about shutting an interstate down for four or five hours... it could have been several days had it gotten to that point.

I'm glad the mayor has given a timetable. I know it's up to him to bring the names, but we don't want to wait more than a year.

It's real special when two teams bring everything they have to a championship basketball game. Both teams played exceptional defense, and this one feels good.

I try to tell them before every game that somebody will have to come in and play well. Those girls really played well tonight.

It's so much less pressure here. No one cares if you make a mistake. You can play a song to try it out. People are very respectful.

There were some kind white people out there who provided a loan here or there, or a little bit of land. But Booker T. Washington and his followers knew that they were going to have to draw from their own resources and they knew that the larger white world was looking at them, every day, closely monitoring them.

They are serious farmers. This is a serious farming operation.