If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

When I was in Philadelphia during the Depression in 1930 or '31 I got a very sad job as a night watchman in a garage. The cars in the garage had been abandoned by their owners since they had lost their jobs and couldn't keep up the payments.

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent at least since the early nineteenth century when 3 000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

You should see what our Founding Fathers used to say to each other and in the early part of our nation. But what they were able to do especially in Philadelphia in 1787 four months they argued about what a House should be what a Senate should be the power of the president the Congress the Supreme Court. And they had to deal with slavery.

Love is much nicer to be in than an automobile accident a tight girdle a higher tax bracket or a holding pattern over Philadelphia.

In Philadelphia our public safety poverty reduction health and economic development all start with education. We can't grow the middle class if we don't give our kids the tools they need to innovate and invent.

The Constitution was written by 55 educated and highly intelligent men in Philadelphia in 1787 but it was written so that it could be understood by people of limited education and modest intelligence.

At 13 I realized that I could fix anything electronic. It was amazing I could just do it. I started a business repairing radios. It grew to be one of the largest in Philadelphia.