Wearing your hair natural is a positive statement about who you are. It's not a protest to somebody else. It's affirming you.
We didn't sit around the dining table talking about Madam Walker, but the silverware that we used every day had her monogram on it and our china for special occasions had been Madam Walker's china... and the baby grand piano on which I learned to read music had been in A'Lelia Walker's apartment in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance.
Don't sit around and wait for the opportunities to come. You have to get up and make those opportunities come.
Twenty is a tough age because it slips past in the middle of so much else - university, gap year, leaving home, getting jobs.
I don't know if English is the only language where some expressions only and solely mean the opposite of what they say but we do have an awful lot of them.
Other people's traditions look charming and decorative and exotic. They're nice places to visit on holiday, but you wouldn't want to live with one.
We always knew how to honor fallen soldiers. They were killed for our sake, they went out on our mission. But how are we to mourn a random man killed in a terrorist attack while sitting in a cafe? How do you mourn a housewife who got on a bus and never returned?
I'm not going to sit here now and say 'do this,' or 'do that.' But you must - must - expunge any vestige of racism.
Universities are not here to be mediums for the coercion of other people, they're here to be mediums for the free exchange of ideas.
The university is our culture's assertion that what is made by the mind has value and can convey values.
