But I was blessed with parents who taught me not to let anyone make me feel like I wasn’t good enough, and as my mother told me, “You are just as good as anyone else. You get an education and try to be somebody. Then you won’t have to be kicked around by anybody, and you won’t have to depend on anyone for your livelihood, not even a man.”

My mother said — and I didn’t realize how well it works — when I’d bring a drawing to her, she said, “I don’t look at the drawing. I looked at the child, and if the child was excited, I got excited.” And then we could discuss it. Because we were bringing something that meant something to me as a child. And so she would join in my lassitude, or my excitement, or my frustration. She wasn’t a psychologist, but she did understand this simple matter. Also, it accomplishes the only thing that has any meaning to a little child. The only thing an adult can give a child is time. That’s all, there isn’t anything else. That’s the only thing they need, really, is time. If you give them time, you’ll have to be understanding of them and give them time.

There’s a few that are immediate, because he just drilled them into my head. One is “Nothing attracts a crowd like a crowd.” Try as hard as you want to market something, get a crowd. That’s what actually matters. Another one that he still says all the time is, “You’ve got a violin, I’ve got a barn. Let’s put on a show. Don’t overthink this, just go.

And I think it had something to do with my grandmother and my mother being nurses, and my mother once said to me, “Once you see people bleed it’s hard to believe there’s much difference in race.

It was only with her help that I did everything. The tragedy was that after 40 years of marriage she died of cancer. I say that if Martin and I had not married the little country girls we married from Alabama, you never would have heard our names.

Everything I did, and I think everything Martin Luther King did, was because we allowed our lives to be in tune with what we felt to be a divine purpose. And it didn’t matter whether we lived or died. It didn’t matter how much money we made, or what we accomplished.

It was only with her help that I did everything. The tragedy was that after 40 years of marriage she died of cancer.

I had followed the experts and put the money I had in television.

I knew what I had done wrong. I had followed the experts and put the money I had in television. The second time around I spent almost no money on television. The only money I spent on television, I spent on Ted Turner's station, late at night on something called Creature Feature and wrestling. Because those were things that I knew people looked at. But we spent most of our money organizing people door-to-door.

Her lesson all the time was “To them to whom much has been given, of them will much be required.”