A Quote by D'Angelo
Aretha Franklin was as important to the civil-rights movement as Malcolm X and Medgar Evers. Artists can choose to take on the tremendous amount of responsibility we have, or choose to ignore it.
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In California, Jim Jones even staged a shooting of himself. The lesson of this was two-fold. One, that he was a god - he could heal himself. He had these magic powers. A large segment of his congregation came from a Pentecostal tradition that believed in faith healing and already believed Jones had the power to cure others. And two, the "shooting" made him seem important. Civil rights leaders were being gunned down - MLK, Jr., Medgar Evers, Malcolm X - and he longed to be considered as heroic and important as they were.
I was sitting on the bus, and the sign said if you're ready to better your life, come to Medgar Evers College, and I got off the bus and went to Medgar Evers College.
That was exciting to be able to comment on civil rights. I mean, the civil rights movement that young people don't know about today, but Martin Luther King was considered by the establishment press in the early years of the sit-in movement as a dangerous man, and he was the equivalent at that time as Malcolm X. And he was told to stop his demonstrations; they were against the law and all of that. Now that he's sainted and sanctified we've forgotten.
Each new moment presents an opportunity for conscious choice. We can choose to let go of the past. We can choose to be here now. We can choose to accept responsibility for ourselves. . . . We can choose to awaken. Or we can choose to remain asleep and unconscious.
In less than a century we experienced great movement. The youth movement! The labor movement! The civil rights movement! The peace movement! The solidarity movement! The women's movement! The disability movement! The disarmament movement! The gay rights movement! The environmental movement! Movement! Transformation! Is there any reason to believe we are done?
The whole reason for the success of Dr. King's civil-rights movement was that it was not a movement for itself. The civil-rights movement understood very clearly, and stated very beautifully, that it was a question of humanism, not a sectarian movement at all.
The American people get to express themselves, and in the ways that they choose. But I have got to tell you, I - this convention, I have sensed a tremendous amount of energy, a tremendous amount of unity, not around the personalities, but around the choice that we face in the fall.
Most importantly for me growing up, it was a spirituals, it was a gospels, it was James Cleveland, Aretha Franklin, Marion Williams; and then it was Curtis Mayfield - The Main Ingredient, The Whispers, Black Blue Magic, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Luther Vandross - that music helped me preserves my sanity, help me preserve whatever dignity I was able to preserve, helping to keep going. It was a source of tremendous strength in my life.
There is only one way out of the trap: that you don`t choose; neither this nor that - you simply don`t choose. You withdraw from choice and you become choiceless. Choicelessness is freedom. To choose is to choose a prison; to choose is to choose a bondage. To choose is wrong, to be choiceless is to be right.
This I choose to do. If there is a price, this I choose to pay. If it is my death, then I choose to die. Where this takes me, there I choose to go. I choose. This I choose to do.
Respectfully, the civil rights movement for people with disabilities is modeled on the African American civil rights movement. I'm old enough to remember 1964. I was a junior in high school.
Black women fought for the right to vote during the suffrage movement and fought again during the civil rights movement. The rote narrative in the press of the civil rights movement is truncated with the briefest of histories of men like Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, or John Lewis.
In our country there's never been a successful progressive struggle that did not have a soundtrack, whether it was the civil rights movement, workers' rights movement, women's rights movement. There's got to be songs at the barricades, and those are the kinds of songs that I try to write.
You know what really made me sick? I was in Washington, D.C. at another time reading in a paper where the U.S. gives Byron de la Beckwith - the man who is charged with murdering Medgar Evers - they were giving him so much money for some land and I ask "Is this America?" We can no longer ignore the fact that America is NOT the "land of the free and the home of the brave."
It is a rare and beautiful thing when we choose to offer love in situations when most people would choose to scorn or ignore.
Don't choose. If you choose, you will be in the quagmire. Don't choose! A choiceless awareness is the goal. Just remain aloof; don't choose. The moment you choose, you have fallen into the trap of the world, or into the trap of the mind.
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