My parents elected me president of the family when I was 4. We actually had an election every year and I always won. I'm an only child, and I could count on my mother's vote.
When you’re young, your world is pretty limited. My parents, my family, my church dominated my world. And because Birmingham was so segregated, I didn’t really have to encounter the slings and arrows of racism on a daily basis. Obviously, from time to time I did, like when my parents took me to see Santa Claus and he wasn’t letting black children sit on his knee. But my parents tried to insulate me as much as they could.
I think it's very humble to believe that there is no man, woman or child who should live in tyranny. That people who say, well, maybe Arabs just aren't ready for democracy or maybe Africans just are going to have corrupt governments, that seems to me arrogant.
The moral case is, people say, "Oh they're not ready for democracy," but that's something someone who lives in a democracy would say about someone who doesn't live in a democracy. Well, if democracy is the highest form of human potential, then it can't be true for us and not for them. But, the practical case is democracies don't invade their neighbors. Democracies don't traffic in child soldiers. Democracies don't harbor terrorists as a state policy. So there's a reason to have more democratic states.
I really do fervently believe that every child deserves to have the kind of access to educational opportunities, broadly defined, including music and sports, that I enjoyed. So, I'm trying to do my part, and I believe that all of us with a privileged background who are fortunate enough to have had that kind of access have a responsibility to try to pass it on.
I grew up in a very loving middle class family. My parents were educators. I'm not even the first PhD in my family. They tried to shield me, just as other parents in my neighborhood tried to shield their children. But you knew there was a reason that you couldn't go to that theme park or to a movie theater or to a hamburger stand. They couldn't shield you completely. What they did though was they never let it be an excuse for not achieving, and they always said racism is somebody else's problem, not yours. They tried in that way not to make us bitter about Birmingham.
I'm very proud that we stood for the proposition that no man, woman or child should ever have to live in tyranny. We believed in democracy and promoted it.
