we know the experience of what it is like to be a mother through the great works of toni morrison.u can really travel with person through the novel, so i think novels show us the deepest part of people's hearts, and you cannot walk away and say, i don't know. it's another more in-depth way of looking at some of these individuality is, which is often denied to people like me because people already think they know who you are because they have seen sound bites on the news. music, literature, art, all these arts that transcend the every day can reach people in a profound way. even in this new novel there is death and some destruction. i wonder if in your life you have a lot of living to do -- i wonder if you think the et --ive writ large about can change, will change, and if so, how does that happen? >> it has to change because it needs more voices. it needs more voices from within. it also needs all of these stereotypical views overturned, and how do you overturn them? by counter narratives. it's not that we have to write novels for that but to raise forces within haiti, from the hai

and it's important that we remember -- as toni morrison puts it, that we remember even the painful details of our past, but that we do it not through grandiose, abstract statements like, "racism was a terrible thing," but to particularize it, what it was like not to be able to sit down at the cut-rate drugstore with your white friends after a basketball game which the black players had won a game in which the black players had played pivotal roles, and then be forced to stand at a counter and drink your vanilla rickey out of a paper cup and not be able to drink it out of a glass, sitting down with your white friends. i mean, it sounds like such a petty thing, but it was of enormous importance. it was the kind of thing that seizes your imagination. i mean, you become determined that one day you'll sit down in that restaurant, being able to date who you wanted, to dance with whom you wanted, being able to encounter yourself in the american history textbooks just like all your white friends encountered themselves. c-span: you also talk a lot about shades of color and the different names that

about the civil rights pioneer that is a young carmichael crossed paths with poet sterling brown, tony morrisoneaching carmichael's freshman english class, howard, how did these relationships shape his activism? >> they shaped it very, very importantly and indelibly. he learns from activists like fanny lou hamer in mississippi, and they teach him the nuts and bolts of social justice and a deep love of black people. he always says he's organizing out of love and undying love for black people. so he's not the angry, young man, the profit of rage that he's been made out to be. that's the stereo type. he's really a complicated charismatic but also sensitive, intelligent and intellectual figure who listened more than he learns from leading different figures of the period, including martin luther king jr. who was a good friend, even though they disagreed politically. >> carmichael changed his name to kwame tur and married miriam makeba. and then he moved to ghana. why the move to africa when engrained in the culture here, and did that hurt his legacy and credibility here in the civil rights movement?