"...I come from a Mississippi family, and my grandmother, Maggie Connolly, was the strongest racist I've ever known. She taught us children and grandchildren the same beliefs and feelings. She taught us to hate white people. So when we moved to Michigan during the Depression, I went to grade school—a one-room schoolhouse—with Chippewa Indian kids and Polish kids and German kids that populated Michigan at that time...those were my friends. And I had to figure out who's right here; are they bad people because of the color of their skin or not? And at an early age, the first year of grade school, I had to sort that out myself and I still live by what I sorted out. I was trained as a racist is what I'm saying. And in sorting that out, I found the beliefs that carried me through my life; that it's never about race, that politics itself is about emotion."
—James Earl Jones (from an interview in the SAG magazine Screen Actor)
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