African Americans

"You can do anything as long as you don't stop believing. When it is meant to be, it will be. You just have to follow your heart."

"Often, kids don’t appreciate the choices available, as if it’s either the street or nothing."

"Learn to love yourself and all that other stuff will not matter."

"Know yourself, listen to your heart, and take risks. Individuality is the best thing anyone has to offer."

"The best word I can use to describe how I feel when performing for an audience is FREE."

"And since there were no professional artistes in my immediate or extended family, I didn’t know what the path would be. That said, I’m thankful for New York City and the courageous community of dreamers who have helped me understand that my dreams can be lived out loud."

"My childhood dream was definitely to be a singer, but as a little girl I thought it was just that, a dream. In the African culture, as you know, it’s very rare to encourage a child to become an artiste. Since I was always involved in the arts, I simply looked at it as a way to be better rounded."

"There is something about performance that both humbles and strengthens you simultaneously. It is where I am happiest and most liberated. My first performance was terrifying but totally thrilling."

"I don’t have a particular favourite musician. There are so many that have inspired, taught, guided, and grounded me."

"I will, however, say that one of the main lessons I’ve learned from such artistes who inspire me is this: Know yourself, listen to your heart, and take risks. Individuality is the best thing anyone has to offer."

"If you become stressed out on stage, your audience becomes stressed with you. It’s important for us to remember that our energy as performers dictates the energy of the room. That said, we can’t take ourselves so seriously."

"What we have to realise is that those questions and occasional resistance to our heart’s pursuits are usually coming from a place of love. Once I realised that, it gave me more room to cultivate and channel positive energy towards accomplishing my goals as a professional musician."

"Today I was nominated for my very first Grammy Award in the Best Jazz Vocal Album category. I am so overwhelmed with gratitude (and can’t stop crying!)"

"I was born in Champaign, Illinois. My father, the late Dr. Ibalaimu Kakoma was completing a post doctoral fellowship at the University of Illinois. He was a Rwandan although he grew up in Uganda. My mother, Elizabeth Nyarubona Kakoma, is a Ugandan."

"Thank you to my family and all who have supported, cheered, inspired, and loved me through my journey. Thank you to the Recording Academy for this honor ….and to the glorious Frankfurt Radio Big Band for making this project a reality. I am so, so, so grateful! Indeed, the journey is a Holy Room (oh, and I cut off my locs!)."

"Of course I had to answer a lot of questions when I announced I wanted to be a professional singer, changed my graduate school focus, and initially struggled as a waitress to pay my bills."

"I am the sixth of seven children. We moved to Zambia when I was three years old and when my father began working for World Health Organisation, we returned to Champaign where he worked as a professor of Veterinary Medicine and Immunology and my mother worked as an oncology nurse."

"One of the greatest blessings of my journey as a professional artiste has been the unconditional love and support of family."

"In many ways, Illinois is just as much my home as Africa because I spent the majority of my formative years there."

"Mistakes might happen, but honest music supersedes all of that."

"I knew that I could sing and dance...my mother would give me a nickel sometimes to stop."

"I think she was quite hopeful, and she wanted to share that success with others. She supported family, friends. People talk about how people would just come to her and she'd give out the money she had, so she's quite generous in that way."

"She’s an artist who’s been resisting white domination with performance — up until she becomes involved in white show business."

"It has made me feel very, very humble, and I shall always hold it as a beacon for anything I may be able to do in the future, I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race and to the motion picture industry."

"I desire a white casket and a white shroud; white gardenias in my hair and in my hands, together with a white gard­enia blanket and a pillow of red roses."

"They didn’t even let her in the theater until right before she got that award. Someone came outside and brought her into the auditorium. She wasn’t even allowed to sit in there."

"I’d rather play a maid than be one."

"I also enjoy vegetarian cooking, writing/reading prose, and spending time with family and friends. Honestly, like anyone who works for themselves, it gets difficult to find balance - especially with my international travel schedule."

"My mother has a beautiful singing voice that she shares generously around the house and in church! (I always consider her my first voice teacher.) And my brother Itonde has a lovely voice and plays a bit of piano and violin."

"She had hoped for a breakthrough role and she told the press that she anticipated one coming, but it wasn’t forthcoming at all. And then on top of it, it traps her kind of in between white Hollywood and then the African-American community. She’s constantly kind of battling that, looking for a balance, to continue to serve the community but at the same time to serve her ambitions, which is to succeed in white Hollywood, and the cost is tremendous. It’s a tremendous personal price she has to pay."

"I completed my undergraduate degree in Cultural Anthropology and African Studies also at the University of Illinois. After college, I spent a year and a half doing research in Kenya and Tanzania with plans of becoming a Medical Anthropologist."

"In recent years I am trying to be more conscientious about work/life balance. It’s a work-in-progress."

"I’ve loved music for as long as I can remember, but didn’t consider making it a career choice until my early twenties. I studied the cello from the time I was eight years old through college and I write my songs on the piano. My primary instrument is my voice."

"No one in my immediate family is a professional musician, although the love of music is definitely prevalent."

"in one important way these young people are very much like the abolitionists of old: they have a healthy disrespect for respectability; they are not ashamed of being agitators and trouble-makers; they see it as the essence of democracy. In defense of William Lloyd Garrison, against the accusation that he was too harsh, a friend replied that the nation was in a sleep so deep "nothing but a rude and almost ruffian-like shake could rouse her." The same deliberate harshness lies behind the activities of James Forman, John Lewis, Bob Moses (activist), and other leaders of SNCC."

"He didn't seek out dramatic confrontations like the Freedom Riders and the sit-ins, but he did inspire a broad range of grassroots leadership. Throughout his life, Bob Moses bent the arc of the moral universe towards justice. He was a strategist at the core of the voting rights movement and beyond. He was a giant. May his light continue to guide us as we face another wave of Jim Crow laws."

"Along with the economic exploitation that the whole state of Mississippi inflicts upon the Negro, there was the ever-present problem of physical violence. As we rode along the dusty roads of the Delta country, our companions cited unbelievable cases of police brutality and incidents of Negroes being brutally murdered by white mobs. In spite of this, there was a ray of hope. This ray of hope was seen in the new determination of the Negroes themselves to be free. Under the leadership of Bob Moses, a team of more than a thousand Northern white students and local Negro citizens had instituted a program of voter registration and political action that was one of the most creative attempts I had seen to radically change the oppressive life of the Negro in that entire state and possibly the entire nation. The Negroes in Mississippi had begun to learn that change would come in that lawless, brutal police state only as Negroes reformed the political structure of the area. They had begun this reform in 1964 through the Freedom Democratic Party. The enormity of the task was inescapable. We would have had to put the field staffs of SCLC, NAACP, CORE, SNCC, and a few other agencies to work in the Delta alone. However, no matter how big and difficult a task it was, we began. We encouraged our people in Mississippi to rise up by the hundreds and thousands and demand their freedom-now!"

"A SNCC leader who shunned the spotlight, as Ella Baker did, Moses would provide a model of radical activism tempered by a loving spirit that would inspire and sustain those who worked with him."

"In his Harlem apartment in New York, a young Negro teacher of mathematics named Bob Moses saw a photo in the newspapers of the Greensboro sit-inners. "The students in that picture had a certain look on their faces, sort of sullen, angry, determined. Before, the Negro in the South had always looked on the defensive, cringing. This time they were taking the initiative. They were kids my age, and I knew this had something to do with my own life.""

"When I think about this, in order to become president of the United States, you have to be nominated by one of the two political parties, so the crucial thing for me was, in reflecting back, was the 1964 challenge of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to the National Democratic Convention, because that was where the stage was set that allowed this to happen, because without opening up the national political structure in the country, this wasn’t going to happen. And, you know, we could have gotten the right to vote without the opening up of the national political party structure. And the party structure wasn’t opened up by getting the right to vote; the party structure was opened up by directly challenging in Mississippi the right of Mississippi to send an all-white delegation to the 1964 National Democratic Convention. And it was Fannie Lou Hamer and all the people in that delegation that really forced the national Democratic Party to open up, you know?"

"All I heard and all I saw was Fannie Lou Hamer giving her testimony. I had no idea that while she was giving her testimony, that the President, Lyndon Johnson, was so afraid of this woman, who had been raised and lived her life as a sharecropper and had been working on the Marlow plantation in Sunflower County, outside of Ruleville. He was so afraid of her that he went — you know, at that time, we just had the three networks: ABC, NBC and CBS. And he went to — notified all three networks that he had a special announcement, because he was terrified that her testimony was so powerful and she was so authentic that people would flood the convention, the credentials committee, with telegrams demanding that her party be seated. And so, he went and interrupted her testimony."

"But then the networks decided that this was really an authentic moment, and they replayed what she said that night. And they did flood the credentials committee. And so, I think it was David Lawrence, who was governor of Pennsylvania, who was the chair of the credentials committee. And so, he then postponed the decision, and they went after the delegates on the credentials committee. Johnson went after them, because the issue was whether there would be eleven delegates on the credentials committee who would vote to support the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and thus enable a floor discussion, in other words, that the issue — we’re talking about democracy, right? So the question is, are we going to be able to get a full discussion and debate by the whole convention around this really critical issue? And, of course, Johnson didn’t want that. He did not want this to go to the floor, because once it went to the floor and everybody had to get up in public and state their views, then the Democratic Party would have had to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party. And, of course, what Johnson was afraid of was that the whole South would then walk out of the Democratic Party. So this was really high drama. Barack Obama could not be running for president if he had not been able to secure a party to run for. And the Democratic Party, from the time of after the Civil War right until 1964, there were no black delegates to the Democratic Party from the South, and it was that action, more than anything else, which opened up the national party structure and allowed eventually what is happening today to happen."

"There are a lot of young people that came out of SNCC, and not just came out of SNCC, but people who came down in to work in the Freedom Summer and spread out into the country — Mario Savio, right? — people in a lot of the different movements in the country. Bernice Johnson Reagon, who also came out of SNCC, and Sweet Honey in the Rock, that group of singers, all those were inspired by SNCC. And Bernice says the civil rights movement was the “borning movement,” right? It was — and SNCC was right at the heart of that borning movement."

"We struggled with it in our generation. What were we willing to do to force the country to live up to its ideals, right? There’s this big gap. Talk about gaps. The big gap is between the ideals the country has and the practices it condones. But so, we had to do that in the ’60s, and this generation is going to have to do the same."

"What happened, I think, was Ella Baker was really sort of the godmother for SNCC. I met Ella in the summer of 1960. And in the spring of 1960, she had taken the initiative to get the student sit-in energy at Shaw, her alma mater, and held off on the big civil rights leaders, to say, “Look, the kids ought to have the opportunity to manage their own insurgency,” right? And so, SNCC was the encapsulation of the sit-in movement, the energy of the sit-in movement, right? And so, that — and SNCC took that energy into the Freedom Rides, because it was the SNCC energy which said to the president of the United States and the attorney general, “It doesn’t matter what you’re saying, that, you know, there’s some danger here. Our lives are in danger, but we’ve decided that, with our lives, this is what we want to do.” Right? And so, SNCC, really, and those students became the example for students all over the country — right? — the idea that students should draw a line in the sand and say, “Look, that’s it. That’s enough. We don’t want to live in this country unless we can change it.”"

"Judge Clayton looks over, and he wants to know why are we taking illiterates down to register to vote. And so, in a nutshell, our answer is, “Well, the country can’t have its cake and eat it too. It can’t have denied a whole people access to literacy through its political arrangements and then turn around and say, ‘Well, you can’t access politics because you’re illiterate.’” And we won that struggle. We won it in the courts. And it was Judge Wisdom’s decision in the case of U.S. v. Louisiana, where he said, well, we can’t allow the State of Louisiana to have authority over the actual qualifications of voting."

"In Mississippi, in the '60s, what we worked was the demand side of the problem, right? You weren't going to get this country to change the balance of power between the federal government and the states, without the demand from actual citizens saying, “Look, you’ve got to treat us as citizens of the country,” right? So, what we did was get the sharecroppers, by the hundreds, to demand their rights. Now, what every reporter came up to me and said was, “Well, Bob, isn’t the problem your people are apathetic? Isn’t that the problem?” Right? And so, I had to wrestle with that question. But it became clear to me that our problem was: How do we tap into the energy of the sharecroppers and get them to make the demand, because as soon as they make the demand, that question disintegrates, right? It’s no longer something that people — if the sharecroppers are standing out there by the hundreds and the thousands demanding the right to vote, then where’s the apathy? So, we have a similar problem today with the kids. I mean, what is said is, “Well, the kids are dysfunctional. They don’t have fathers who are really…” So, as soon as you get the kids by the hundreds and the thousands themselves demanding what everyone says they don’t want — right? — then that problem disappears. That’s not the problem, right?"

"I've lived most of my life. What I would like to see happen in this country in my lifetime is the next generation get ready to launch the next lurch forward."

"if you think about the civil rights movement, what we were able to do was get Jim Crow out of three very distinct arenas in the country: First, there was public accommodations; second, there was voting rights and access to the political structures of the country; and third, and not well known, access to the national party structure itself — that is, to the Democratic Party. And that was Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 convention of the Democratic Party. And remember, Kennedy had been assassinated. Johnson had been moved into the presidency, but he hadn’t been nominated yet, right? And so, we won those struggles, but what we didn’t win was getting Jim Crow out of education, right? And that was actually the subtext of the right to vote."

"I should be married and have 19 kids, And now I’m thinking my eggs are dying on the shelf. They’re going to go past their expiration date. But it’s what I chose, so I’m fine with that decision."