I’d have no trouble being the barbecue kingpin of America. I’d just add it to all the other things I am: jazz musician, carpenter, architect, engineer and revolutionary.
America
Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia, and that the Jewish people’s problems were worse than ours.
The good fortune of America is closely tied to the good fortune of all humanity.
The FBI’s Counter-Intelligence Program would work hand-in-hand with police departments, literally planning attacks on Black Panther Party offices throughout the United States of America. They did this over a period of time.
America, I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.
I would want the British reader to feel that religion in America isn’t an absurd thing – a sign of a pin head athwart a gigantic body.
Jazz, to me, is one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America: the eternal tom-tom beating in the Negro soul – the tom-tom of revolt against weariness in a white world, a world of subway trains, and work, work, work; the tom-tom of joy and laughter, and pain swallowed in a smile.
Only blacks can play the race card, apparently; only they think in racial terms, at least to hear white America tell it.
Let a man find himself, in distinction from others, on top of two wheels with a chain – at least in a poor country like Russia – and his vanity begins to swell out like his tires. In America it takes an automobile to produce this effect.
The grandest thing has been the lifting up of the gates and the opening of the doors to the women of America, giving liberty to twenty-seven million women, thus opening to them a new and larger life and a higher ideal.