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In the South we experienced, you know, some black kids who gave us a hard time because - cause 'you talk white.' We didn't talk white. We talked fairly proper. Plus, we had a Midwestern accent, so we didn't have a Southern accent, either. So it wasn't really talking white; it was talking different.

It was the best route to get folks to understand segregation fast. Civil rights and women's rights had a clear history. Making the transition to rights for people with disabilities became easier because we had the history of the other two.

I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, 'Hey man, we don't go for that anymore.'

I remember sitting there on my father's couch or my mother's couch, listening to this lecture about how there were two groups and we had to be separated. We've come a long way from this kind of open racism. And I think it's wonderful.

Kids that I went to school with didn't know how to interact with black people like that. There were only, like, three or four black kids in the class.

I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights.

Well, I've been politically involved for a really long time. Growing up in the segregated South, it was a very painful experience for me to live through the open racism of the time.

In the time when my mother began standing up against prejudice and racism, the vast majority of white Americans rarely thought about civil rights.

I never ceased to be surprised when southern whites, at their homes or clubs, told racial jokes and spoke so derogatorily of blacks while longtime servants, for whom they quite clearly had some affection, were well within earshot.

People feel uncomfortable talking about racial issues out of fear that if they express things, they will be characterized in a way that's not fair. I think that there is still a need for a dialogue about things racial that we've not engaged in.