First Hand History

"I don't think we've made any progress. I feel like we went down in everything -- the economy, the peace. Everything is down. No one knows what to do now."

"A white guy and a black guy walking around at the fair together? There would have been trouble. "

"There is still continual prejudice out there, and I don’t think it’s on purpose. It’s just that it seems like Asian-Americans are viewed differently than other minorities in the U.S."

"I wanted everybody to be equal or go as far as their brains could take them. "

"It is really sad that people who perpetuate anti-semitism always come to mind more."

"And I told her that I didn't feel that that was right, what she had said and that it was racial and she was kinda' profiling a person."

"From when I moved in to know, the neighborhood has changed so drastically. It’s hard to even consider it the same neighborhood."

"Whether they are being shot at or not, these young people can be called on to be sent somewhere to do the humanitarian work for the rest of us."

"Social injustice is not just based on race; it is also based on gender, age, religion or any type of difference that the majority does not have."

"I thought it would be just wonderful to get married here in Texas, but there were laws against it."

"We weren't trying to change the whole system but to support an alternative one."

"When the name Rundberg is not a negative name, and people think of it as a place to go, that will be success."

"A few decades ago women were only good for housework."

"I remember the last week when I was in India. I was thinking, will I ever see this environment again, those friends and neighbors I pretty much grew up with? That never happened. Time doesn't stop for anybody. "

"There were areas of poor people living in what we would call, slum type conditions..."

"I was so embarrassed that I remember I thought to myself that I would do anything and everything to get rid of that accent, and I did. "

"I think that just tells us that in spite of our differences, in spite of the locations we inhabit, we’re all part of the same household. We’re all truly brothers and sisters."

"I recently talked to an AISD official about my project and how to implement it at other schools. We are all on board about it and are going to try to get it started before summer starts."

"You have young people who find themselves in a situation where their family is torn apart, they don't have much money, they don't live in a good neighborhood, they don't have positive role models. That's a young person with potential, but without the right guidance might not ever realize their full potential."

"This is a wonderful country, it's a big country, has lots to offer and I still have not had the chance to see all of it, yet. ...This is the best country I could ever be in to raise a family, so many opportunities and resources available, I didn't take it for granted at all."

"Every time I was discriminated because I was a woman, I wanted to be reborn as a man and get treated like every men did, especially because my parents wanted sons."

". . . I, and many other physicians, believe health insurance is a basic human right, especially in a wealthy country like ours."

"As a kid growing up you either ended up in prison or you would be pushed into the military."

"Most of the criminals I’ve dealt with were not evil people."

"People were being shot in the streets. The Russian soldiers made a circle with tanks around the plaza. One of the Russian soldiers took out a machine gun, and there were a whole bunch of Czech people yelling at the tanks telling them to go home and that the Czech people didn't want them here. The young Russian soldier with the machine gun emptied his whole clip into the crowd of people, murdering dozens."

"And if you see your grandmother like that, who you love, it can't leave you."

"Everyone had their place, and you just stayed in your place."

"It was the center of all the hatred and the marches..."

"Education. There is no better investment."

"Right now, how things are, they could get deported any time -- especially my dad. "

"I am getting ready to watch women’s basketball on television, and there would not have even been a glimmer of any women’s sport on television back in the 1980s. "

"I remember asking kids sitting next to me, ‘What is the teacher saying? What is she saying, I don’t understand’ -- and the teacher would snap and say, ‘Remember, you’re supposed to be speaking English!’"

"We didn’t give it a lot of thought, and we weren’t really that informed about it to tell you the truth. That’s just how we lived, an all-white school in an all-white neighborhood."

"Just to let you know, USA is the best country in the world."

"There was a big disparity between my classroom and my friends’ classrooms who taught in white schools in the same city."

"I just learned just how ruthless leaders of countries can be and you, you kind of learn just by what was going on as to what some of these leaders were doing in the foreign countries, and what they were doing to the people. Having not been exposed to those kind of atrocities, it became a real learning experience for me. "

"I was supposed to be a scientist. I went off to Berkeley to study Physics, and all through high school I did that, but I also wrote a lot, played the piano, had other things I liked to do. I dropped out of school, went to Mexico for about a year, and then came back knowing that I wanted to be a filmmaker."

"I was never in touch with black people -- never had to get to know any of them. We kind of absorbed the views of our parents, and the people we lived with, people we came in touch with at that time and place, and I’m not saying they were mean people or vicious people. Our parents were not mean or vicious, they were good people, but they had stereotypes and ideas about blacks..."

"I think that it was just harder -- I had to prove myself more; I had to get better grades. To get the same opportunities, I had to fight for things just because of an unconscious bias that was there."

"Working on the fields picking pickles, picking tomatoes from sun up to sun down, at 7am to 7pm, every day except for Sunday, was hard work -- and we knew we didn’t want to do that the rest of our lives."

"Not everybody can say they’ve carried little babies around in a little basket and gone down to the morgue and put them in a little refrigerator."

"I think wherever there’s a case where two people want to live together, take care of each other, and support each other, I don’t see how that could be bad for anyone."

"We have partnered with high schools so that not only do they get four years of high school, but they also get two years worth of college tuition at no cost."

"We talked about worrying about getting back to our families, and what would happen if we died in the sea."

"What is most misunderstood about at-risk youth is the belief that people are just rotten kids or that young people have the ability to make rational choices or can choose what is right and wrong. Kids brains are not developed enough to make logical choices."

"It’s a different age now. Police brutality wasn't as big of a problem in the ‘60s and ‘70s as it is now, where the police departments are the enemy. But when you come right down to it, police are trying to deal with people that break rules. "

"There were violence going on at the time these people had,clans Ku Klux Klans they would come and terrorize you, beat you, drag you"

"Fighting for our rights was an amazing experience."

"If I were to do it again then I would’ve demanded that all of the school mobs be arrested and put in prison for the duration if they didn’t stop what they were doing. "

"I’d visit back home in the summertime, over break, but in order to do that I would need an interzonenpass, and that wasn’t something given to everybody. Sometimes it would work, sometimes it wouldn’t."

"We had some black students before the closure, not very many, and then we had a bunch. In the back of your mind, you knew things weren't right. "

"It was hard to overcome but something about being a soldier, is that you never get used to it. You just have to overcome it."

"War never solves anything."

"We’re opening an avenue for those who are despised and outcasts in our city to feel welcomed, loved, and appreciated."

"Stand up for what you believe in, don't take guff from anybody. It's like, if you know you can do the job, and you've proven you can do the job, then you just keep doing your job, and don't let anybody get in your way, which is not easy to do all of the time."

"They beat ‘em, they did not want em to go across Selma bridge, and so they just run over, the police did this. They’d catch the people, they’d beat em, they'd stomped on em, as they was going cross the bridge, which was very very very bad, and they hurt a lot of people. Some peoples was crippled on account of the way they walked on ‘em."

"I have always been on terms of that we are all God's children and that we all are equal in the sight of God and that we should all be equal in the sight of everyone else."

"I think the big problem is that it's been since 1986 that there was the last immigration reform, so we're talking about three decades of people living here in the shadows."

"Profiling is a word that’s been made into something bad."

"I think people need to come together to help each other."

"Unless ideas of hate are given to you or someone is provoking racist attitudes, kids naturally don't care much about such things."

"So I felt out of place. I was always frustrated with other people, they would talk and I would want to know what they said... At the time it was a hearing world. And it was separated from the deaf world. They're both very different cultures."

"All of us are learning how to listen to God, we’re all in the same boat! "

"No, that's done. We have forgiven them. They have been good to us already, and anyways, that is war."

"There are many controversial and non-controversial uses of drones in today’s culture."

"War is something that brings no one any good. War is something that should never be suggested as an alternative to peace. Peace is supreme to war. "

"You cannot teach what you do not know, and you cannot lead where you will not go."

"I had been in Vietnam for quite a while, and I flew as a door gunner, in addition to being a medic."

"But it’s not just about having access to education, it’s also about the quality of that education."

"Social Justice is the freedom and the right to be who you are, and actualize your beliefs."

"My husband thought there would be riots all over the place. He barricaded the door to our house and had his gun ready."

"I don't know if I'd call myself an activist, I just sort of feel like I'm quietly accomplishing micro things for a bunch of different people. I don't know if that counts as activism but it's fun."

"I think you should lose your privilege to social media, that's how serious this is."

"It would be nice for everybody to ‘coexist,’ but it’s never going to happen. There’s always going to be wars. If we want our way of life, we have to fight wars."

"In my personal opinion, I think the system is broken, and I don't know how they're going to fix it."

"I think that this choice is just between a woman and her doctor. Because, I feel that if we start taking those choices away, what other freedoms will we lose?"

"Seventy-five percent of Texas voted to ban gay marriage."

"We should treat everyone with justice, and everyone humanely, and everyone the way we would want to be treated if we had to flee our country and go to another country. "

"Unfortunately, the method they used was one of apartheid -- which was cruel, which was immoral, which was unfair."

"One of the greatest compliments a lawyer paid me several years ago was to say, ‘You know Bev, you’re such a nice, sweet girl, and you do so much good in the community, I didn’t even know the knife was in my back until you pulled it out.’ And I said to him ‘Thank you.’"

"We don’t want them to forget Pakistan. We are not saying focus only on Kashmir. That is not the point. We want a stable government in Pakistan. We also want a stable government in India."

"I feel that the developing kids in my class have a better understanding of accepting different people each time they leave my class. We always want to give the kids an understanding that there is still room to learn and that we never stop learning."

"We don’t think about why we do it, because people worry too much about what they can’t control, but I can fight in this war and be satisfied with what I can control."

"We were denied renting the apartment because of my name, and the way I looked to them, because I was Hispanic. And yet when we left the apartment office we could see signs outside that said 'Apartments for Rent.' They had apartments to rent, just not for us because I was not an Anglo."

"We had the best education you could ever find anywhere in the public schools of Texas. And this changed when women could be doctors, lawyers, and CEOs or whatever else. We now have them as presidents of major companies."

"It started with the curfews imposed on Jews -- we were obliged to wear stars. I wasn’t worried about having to wear a star; we just had to. There was no choice."

"My parents were born in South Africa, but my ancestors are from Lithuania and moved to South Africa. I was lucky enough to live in a place that was really beautiful."

"But we’re not here in this world to just be comfortable, just to be nice and fuzzy and warm and friendly. We’re being improved, and the tough things you go through -- those are the things that help you. Those are the things that mold your character and your heart..."

"I never use the term homosexual. There’s nothing really wrong with it, it just seems scientific."

"Yes. I was for nonviolence all the way. I thought that any other way of achieving this. When I saw what we had gone through in early years. I thought that he had such an elegant way. He was like Gandhi."

"That was his last speech. And I was there that night, at Mason Temple -- that was April the 3rd, 1968."

"The question is when was the last time you've walked someplace where you felt clearly unwanted. That’s something that unfortunately is an uncommon occurrence, but it’s something I feel on a regular basis. I know some of it is because of my hair. It’s rather long and most people don't see it all that often. But there isn't a time where I’m not reminded of the color of my skin. So the question is when was the last time you were reminded of the color of your skin and not the person who you are. For me I am reminded of it everyday."

"In combat I was just reacting to the threat, and I just did what I was trained to do. But it is after the fight when you think about what you should’ve and shouldn’t have done."