We must always refill and ensure there is a critical mass of leaders and activists committed to nonviolence and racial and economic justice who will keep seeding and building transforming movements.

It was clear to me as a civil rights leader in the '60s that unless we put the social and economic underpinnings beneath the political and the civil rights, we wouldn't go anywhere.

When President Kennedy was elected, many black Americans, like so many Americans, were captivated by his youth and energy and promise and were especially hopeful that he might move the country in a new direction on civil rights.

It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but if they were kicked off the plantations - and if they didn't have food, didn't have jobs, didn't have health care, didn't have the means to exercise those civil rights, we were not going to have success.

My family came in 1635 from England and settled in Williamsburg. Shortly after, they split up; half went to New England and half stayed in Virginia. I'm a Virginian Ballard.

People want to think that staying in shape costs a lot of money. They couldn't be more wrong. It doesn't cost anything to walk. And it's probably a lot cheaper to go to the corner store and buy vegetables than take a family out for fast food.

I remember my daughter coming back from school one day and saying that the teacher had asked anybody whose parents were divorced to put their hands up. I felt angry but also guilty. And you feel sort of terribly responsible in that sort of situation.

God manifests himself in each historical period according to the understanding of the people of the era.