What I try to tell young people is that if you come together with a mission, and its grounded with love and a sense of community, you can make the impossible possible.
We need some creative tension; people crying out for the things they want.
When you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. You have to say something; you have to do something.
We must continue to go forward as one people, as brothers and sisters.
Early on, I wrote a letter to the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. I was 17. I felt called, moved.
I'm very hopeful. I am very optimistic about the future.
In the past the great majority of minority voters, in Ohio and other places that means African American voters, cast a large percentage of their votes during the early voting process.
My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination, they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble, not to make any noise.
We must bring the issue of mental illness out into the sunlight, out of the shadow, out of the closet, deal with it, treat people, have centers where people can get the necessary help.
There's nothing wrong with a little agitation for what's right or what's fair.
Now we have black and white elected officials working together. Today, we have gone beyond just passing laws. Now we have to create a sense that we are one community, one family. Really, we are the American family.
If someone had told me in 1963 that one day I would be in Congress, I would have said, 'You're crazy. You don't know what you're talking about.'
The government, both state and federal, has a duty to be reasonable and accommodating.
I would say the country is a different country. It is a better country. The signs I saw when I was growing up are gone and they will not return. In many ways the walls of segregation have been torn down.
My mother and father and many of my relatives had been sharecroppers.