If black people use their resources properly, they can become as competitive as any group in society - take control of our neighborhoods, our businesses, our schools, including our teachers. The only thing keeping black people from doing it is this idiotic idea about integration, about being racially balanced.

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time.

Whenever I had been racially vilified before it had been by peers or drunk men. It's more shocking when it's a 13-year-old child. No 13-year-old is racist.

In the Brown decision, the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck down the legal and moral footing of racially segregated public education in this country.

A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family.

When we say the Black church, we have never meant anything racially exclusive by that. The Black church is the antislavery church. It is an independent Christian witness that literally emerged fighting for freedom and insisting that the gospel is about equality, justice and inclusive humanity.

I understand Tea Partyers' anger with the system, but they are in way over their heads and often racially motivated, and I can't be part of that.

Thomas Jefferson, that owner of many slaves, chose to begin the Declaration of Independence by directly contradicting the moral basis of slavery, writing "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights ..." thus undercutting simultaneously any argument that Africans were racially inferior, and also that they or their ancestors could ever have been justly and legally deprived of their freedom. In doing so, however, he did not propose some radically new conception of rights and liberties. Neither have subsequent political philosophers. For the most part, we've just kept the old ones, but with the word "not" inserted here and there. Most of our most precious rights and freedoms are a series of exceptions to an overall moral and legal framework that suggests we shouldn't really have them in the first place.

A racially integrated community is a chronological term timed from the entrance of the first black family to the exit of the last white family.

In the Brown decision the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck down the legal and moral footing of racially segregated public education in this country.

During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed.

I understand Tea Partyers' anger with the system but they are in way over their heads and often racially motivated and I can't be part of that.