How dare anyone, parent, schoolteacher, or merely literary critic, tell me not to act colored.

Yet would we die as some have done, beating a way for the rising sun.

Is there something we have forgotten? Some precious thing we have lost, wandering in strange lands?

Let us keep the dance of rain our fathers kept and tread our dreams beneath the jungle sky.

Once, he said he wanted to be a pilot and then he switched around and wanted to be a police officer.

When people asked him where he was from, he would go, 'I'm from Houston,' because he loved Houston.