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Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?

It is hard for a black man to just be himself. We spend so much time in defense of something that is indefensible because there is nothing to defend.

Martin Luther King was a misguided leader. He worked to be recognized as the leader of black America, when what black America needs isn't a leader - it is education. Giving speeches and marching - that's not the concept that brings about real freedom, equality and justice.

When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.

Sadly, black people disassociate ourselves from the things which make us who we are, identifying them as lesser, or inferior. It's a form of self hate. So, with reckless abandon, we strive to be like the majority.

Sometimes black people really want to hold onto our oppression - 'This is ours! This belongs to us.' You can't just talk about equality for somebody else. Let's pass it on. Let's pass it on to somebody else. At the end of the day, it is all about inequality.

There haven't been enough profound things written about what being black means and what a black character is. Nobody knows.