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It is a commonplace by now to say that the urban school systems of America contain a higher percentage of Negro children each year.

We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about.

Sure, there's a chunk of African-Americans out there who associate the Republican Party with racism, frankly particularly in the Deep South. It's an unfair perception, but it exists. Over a period time, that perception will die away if Republicans are focusing on issues that happen to impact African-Americans.

You draw a district for that particular minority - African American, Asian, Hispanic - so those folks have the right to elect whoever they want. If they don't decide to elect someone who sounds like them or looks like them, they can pick anyone they want.

So one of the things that happened with integration in the South is they found that the black teachers were much more educated than the white teachers.

It's really kind of hard to be a suburb of nothing. If you don't have a downtown, you really don't have anything. It's hard to build a community around parking lots and subdivisions.

You have little representation of young black men in the business sector, so you have children growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods who don't hear discussions at the dinner table about what goes on in business. It's almost as if we have two nations.

One of the problems with the fiasco of suburbia is that it destroyed our understanding of the distinction between the country and the town, between the urban and the rural. They're not the same thing.

In a genuinely conservative district like mine, it's hard to out-Republican me.

I grew up in an all-black neighbourhood in Decatur, Georgia - a kinda lower-middle-class area.