As I stood and gave the eulogy for young Michael Brown last week, I kept thinking about the fact that this child should have been in college instead of laying in a coffin.
I've been to two stadium gigs in my life. One was James Brown and the other was Pink Floyd. They both sounded the same. I couldn't tell the difference between James Brown and Pink Floyd. I've never liked stadiums.
You may be assured that we won't ever let your words die. Like the words of our Master, Jesus Christ, they will live in our minds and our hearts and in the souls of black men and white men, brown men and yellow men as long as time shall last.
I think the best thing about being James Brown is looking at my little son. Hopefully I can make my son a role model to a lot of people.
You want a hero in the music world? James Brown. He brought a feeling to music without really using words. He's just famous for his sound.
In the middle of the night, when you're ambiguously ethnic, like me, when you're brown, beige, mauve, siena, one of those lighter browns in the Crayola box. You have to be careful of the cops and robbers, because nobody's quite sure what you are, but everybody has assumptions.
John Brown's effort was peculiar. It was not a slave insurrection.
As a kid, there are some things you looked forward to. You looked forward to Charlie Brown during Halloween and you looked forward to Monday Night Football.
John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.
I named my new son James Joseph Brown II. I think he's going to be a lot better than I was.
I was raised in a mostly white neighborhood. I was this little white girl jamming out to Ella Fitzgerald and Bobby Brown.
My dad was into the 1950s doo-wop era. If you look at those groups, or at James Brown, Jackie Wilson and the Temptations in the 1960s, you'll see you had to be sharp onstage.
The goldenrod is yellow, The corn is turning brown, The trees in apple orchards With fruit are bending down.
John Brown was the abolitionist to end all abolitionists. People thought he was crazy. He was like John Coltrane playing free jazz, exhausting all possibilities in his approach to harmony and improvisation.
When I was in my early 20s, I studied tae kwon do and hapkido. I earned brown belts in both of them.
As the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case has shown us, separate is not always equal.
This is the thing about hip-hop music and where people get it most misconstrued: It's all hip-hop. You can't say that just what I do is hip-hop, because hip-hop is all energies. James Brown can get on the track and mumble all day. But guess what? You felt his soul on those records.
My blood's not red or blue - it's brown.
In terms of style, I'm really inspired by Foxy Brown and Naomi Campbell.
John Brown was tried for treason, murder, and inciting slaves to insurrection.
If a man dreams that he has committed a sin before which the sun hid his face, it is often safe to conjecture that, in sheer forgetfulness, he wore a red tie, or brown boots with evening dress.
With her high pale brow under her faded brown hair, she was like a rock washed clean by years of her husband's absences at conventions, dinners, committee meetings or simply at the office.
When I got to Florida, I was a British kid, but I was also an Indian kid: a brown kid with an English accent. Talk about being an outsider. And that's become the theme of a lot of the stuff I write about.
We spent too much time attacking Gordon Brown and Labour rather than setting out our own plans. People had decided they wanted change - the thing they were not sure about was the alternative we were offering, so going on and on about Labour missed the point.
I used to love 'Murphy Brown' as a kid. I didn't even understand half of the jokes that were going on, but I loved the character so much that they stood out.
I knew exactly what I was, and there was no hang-up with me. None whatsoever. The fact that the pigment of my skin maybe being lighter brown than other people of my race, maybe some of them, but you know our race has all colors.
I've met loads of black and brown and various people who are well into comics.
It's like James Brown used to say... I don't know, but whatever I play it's got to be funky.
My husband is such a healthy eater. Except when it comes to sweets. He never consumes anything except fruit until noon. And then from noon on he might have some brown rice and some tofu, and then, come eight or nine at night, he orders three mud-pie double-chocolate pieces of cake and eats all three of them.
Because makeup happens in my life as an actor, face wash is a key. I use La Mer cleansing gel every morning, every night, sometimes three times a day. Also, I use Bobbi Brown's Hydrating Face Tonic that you put on after you wash your face. It just rejuvenates your face. It takes away that morning face.
I was always looking at footage of dancers from Nicholas Brothers to Ralph Brown to Sand Man to Miller Brothers and Lois, and I grew up looking at old footage.
James Brown's music still sounds as fresh and as good and as new as it did when he first created it.
My eyes are green, and in one of them there is a splash of brown - apparently it is not a colour, but a freckle! Sometimes I notice that one eyelid droops more than the other.
I love being brown, so I love using Guerlain Terracotta Bronzing Powder. I use it everywhere: my forehead, my cheekbones, a little bit by my chin. It gives me a golden balance that I really like. I also use the Becca Shimmering Skin Perfector for my highlighter right underneath my eye. It's a pretty color - it's not too much and not too little.
Urs Fischer specializes in making jaws drop. Cutting giant holes in gallery walls, digging a crater in Gavin Brown's gallery floor in 2007, creating amazing hyperrealist wallpaper for a group show at Tony Shafrazi: It all percolates with uncanny destructiveness, operatic uncontrollability, and barbaric sculptural power.
I've thought from the start that a parallel federal investigation into the death of Michael Brown is important. I also believe that our state and local elected officials have been given a responsibility by the people who they work for to get to the bottom of this tragedy.
