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Richard Leakey
Paleoanthropologist and Conservationist
Getting into politics as a white Kenyan, quite late in the day, and doing it by forming an opposition to the incumbent president and demanding that there be constitutional reform and demanding that there be greater sensitivity to human rights and democracy, and leading a movement of young and people of other color -- I was a minority -- but being part of the fray, being attacked, being whipped and cars burnt, being beaten up, being tear-gassed, being locked up, chained up, this was all tremendously exciting. They said you couldn't do it, but we did it.
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Richard Leakey
Paleoanthropologist and Conservationist
My kidney disease in '69, it wasn't pleasant. I had a transplant much later. I got 11 years out of my kidney failure. Then I had a transplant. I got 26 years out of that, and I had another transplant last year, and I am fine. I'm getting expert now at kidney disease. It's a tough disease, and many people don't survive it, but I am one of the lucky ones, and it's worked. Even the latest transplant, which -- my wife very kindly gave me a kidney. She's not a blood relative, but the drugs today are very good, and if you've got a good attitude, I think you're fine.
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Richard Leakey
Paleoanthropologist and Conservationist
I lost my legs, but the way you look at it is, "What happened if the legs had lost me?" I buried the legs rather than myself, and so that's a good thing. Walking on artificial legs isn't the best way to get around, but there are advantages. People go out of their way to help you. You get wheelchairs through long queues, and lines at customs and immigration. If the seat's too small in an airline, you can take your legs off and fit in very comfortably. So there are a number of positives about this, and I wouldn't by any means think it was all negative. It taught me a great deal about bipedalism, which is the fundamental of humanity. I had always lectured about the important steps in becoming a human, one of which is bipedalism. It happened six, seven million years ago probably. I never really thought about the implications of being bipedal, and to me, bipedalism is the key to the extraordinary levels of compassion that we seem to be programmed to. People don't necessarily come to that conclusion.
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Leon Lederman
Nobel Prize in Physics
Leon Lederman: When you have set-backs, you cry, you saw on your wrists with a butter knife or something, so it doesn't do permanent damage. Yeah, you get depressed, and you work at it, because what else can you do? I think that's probably true. You can get discouraged. They have a lot of discouragement in this. You know, more often than not, things don't work. It's the ordinariness of nature and equipment, and so on, that things don't work. So you get too used to that pretty soon and you know that sooner or later something may work.
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John Lewis
Champion of Civil Rights
John Lewis: Somehow, in some way, I just felt that we were involved in something that was so large, so necessary, so right. It was almost holy. It was something very righteous and something very pure about it. I was sitting there with other young college students. For the most part we were well dressed, we were orderly, we were peaceful, and we were looking straight ahead, or either we were doing our homework, and people would come up and call us "niggers." They would come up and spit on us, put lighted cigarettes out in our hair or down our backs, pull us off the lunch counter stool, and we didn't strike back. At times we would just look straight ahead. I just felt that we had to do what we were doing and that it was necessary.
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John Lewis
Champion of Civil Rights
I will never forget in late February 1960, one morning we were preparing to sit in, and a very influential citizen of Nashville came to the church where we were gathering and said if we go down on this particular day the officials were going to allow people to beat us, to pull us off the lunch counter stools, and then going to arrest us, and, "Maybe you shouldn't go. Maybe it's too dangerous." And we all said we had to go, and we went down. When I was growing up, my mother and father and family members said, "Don't get in trouble. Don't get in the way." I got in trouble. I got in the way. It was necessary trouble. While we were sitting there and we were being pulled off the lunch counter stools and then beaten, the local officials, police officials, the chief of police and others, came up and placed us all under arrest. I was arrested along with 87 other students. The Nashville sit-ins became the first mass arrest in the sit-in movement, and I was taken to jail. I'll tell you, I felt so liberated. I felt so free. I felt like I had crossed over. I think I said to myself, "What else can you do to me? You beat me. You harassed me. Now you have placed me under arrest. You put us in jail. What's left? You can kill us?" But as a group, and I know as one person, we were determined to see the end of segregation and racial discrimination in places of public accommodation. So I lost my sense of fear. You know, no one would like to be beaten. No one would like to go to jail. Jail is not a pleasant place. No one liked to suffer pain, but for the common good we were committed.
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John Lewis
Champion of Civil Rights
John Lewis: As we started walking across the Alabama River, across the Edmund Pettus bridge, I really thought that we would be arrested and taken to jail. I was prepared to be arrested, and I was wearing a backpack, and in this backpack I had two books, an apple, an orange, toothbrush and toothpaste. I thought we were going to go to jail. I wanted to have something to read, something to eat, and since I was going to be in jail with my friends, colleagues and neighbors, I wanted to be able to brush my teeth. And we get to the high point, highest point on that bridge. Down below we saw the Alabama State Troopers, the Sheriff's Deputies, members of Sheriff Clark's posse, and when Major John Claude said, "This is an unlawful march." I think he said, "I am Major John Claude of the Alabama State Troopers. This is an unlawful march. You will not be allowed to continue. I give you three minutes to disperse and return to your church." And I think Hosea Williams said, "Major, will you give us a moment to pray?" And before we could even get word back, he said, "Troopers advance." I knew then that we were going to be beaten. And you saw these men putting on their gas masks and they came towards us beating us with night sticks, pushing us, trampling us with horses, and releasing the tear gas. I became very concerned about the other people in the march, because I thought I was going to die. I just sort of said to myself, "This is it. This is the end of the road for me. I'm going to die right here on this bridge." And to this day, 39 years later, I don't know how I made it back across the bridge, through the streets of Selma, back to that little church that we left from, but I do recall being back at that church that Sunday afternoon.
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