“For a black student to work in southwest Mississippi for example - or ...” — John Doar Quote

For a black student to work in southwest Mississippi for example - or in the Delta in 1960, 1961, 1962 - was high-risk work.

Countless black citizens in the South couldn't vote. They were second-class citizens from cradle to grave. The discrimination was terrible, brutal.

I'm not saying to you that every element of segregation and discrimination and second-class citizenship has changed. But in the political sense, the world has changed. People now who want to vote can vote.

To me, success is seeing that justice is done.

You're not going to win anything with bottles and bricks.

Unless engineers can stop southern Louisiana from sinking into the Gulf - the Mississippi Delta is the fastest-disappearing land on the planet - even post-Katrina's modernized levees will be overwhelmed.

My parents were super busy, with my dad working at Delta and my mom at a bank, but our lives became tennis.

We concluded that you cannot rely on delta hedging alone. It sounds simplistic to say that now, but back then, this was the sort of thing people were only just beginning to realize.

For anyone who feels they are overwhelmed by their job, or maybe they take their job too seriously or are working too hard, I say go to a safari, particularly the Okavango Delta, and just be humbled.