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Eric Lander
Founding Director, Broad Institute
Eric Lander: The American Dream to me means that anything is possible. I think that's something that's so uniquely American. I tremendously enjoyed going to graduate school in England, but one thing that struck me was that my fellow graduate students imagined when they were in graduate school that they knew what their lives were about. They knew that they were mathematicians or scientists or English majors. They felt that, early in schooling, they had been channeled in a certain way, and perhaps in some ways, still, in England, through class in certain ways. None of my fellow graduate students -- English graduate students -- felt that they could do anything with their lives, and it was really puzzling to them that I wasn't at all clear that I wanted to be a mathematician, but I was still in graduate school and that I had this -- I think -- uniquely American sense that you could always do whatever you wanted. You could reinvent yourself in some ways. Now that's not to say it's easy. It's not to say it's not a struggle. It's not to say it will always work. But to me, what America is about, is a statement that the individual can continue to learn, continue to change, and that we all help each other to do that. I think that's a tremendously strong aspect of America. Something that I very much want to make sure we never lose.
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John Lewis
Champion of Civil Rights
"At times history and fate meet at a single place in man's unending search for freedom. So it was more than a century ago at Lexington and at Concord. So it was at Appomattox. So it was last week in Selma, Alabama." He condemned the violence in Selma, and he mentioned the fact that one good man, a man of God, was killed. Reverend James Reed, a white minister from Boston, had participated in a march on March 9th. And then the night of March 9th he went out to try to get something to eat with two or three other white ministers, and they were jumped and beaten by members of the Klan, and a day or so later he died at a local hospital in Birmingham. President Johnson recognized that, but before he closed that speech and introduced the Voting Rights Act he said, "We shall overcome." He said it more than once, "And we shall overcome." And he became the first President to use the theme song of the Civil Rights Movement in a major speech, and Dr. King was so moved he started crying, and we all cried a little when we heard Lyndon Johnson say, "And we shall overcome."
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John Lewis
Champion of Civil Rights
I still talk about the Beloved Community. I still talk about the one America, one family, one house. The American house, the world house, we all live in the same house. Sometimes I feel like I've passed this way once before. I think the movement and what I went through during the height of the Civil Rights Movement prepared me to stand up and fight for what I think is right and fair and just, but it also prepared me to be patient in a sense, to take the long hard look. That the struggle to redeem the soul of America, to create the Beloved Community, or to bring about change, is not a struggle that lasts for one day or one month or one year, but is a struggle of a lifetime. So if you're trying to get a piece of legislation through the Atlanta City Council, or try to get a piece of legislation through the Congress, or try to change your fellow members to move to a certain -- you just keep working at it. You don't give up. You hang in there. And that's what we did during the height of the Civil Rights Movement, and that's what we continue to do today, for the fight is not just for today, but it's for tomorrow and the next year and years to come.
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