"The Revolution Will Not Be Televised" - Gil Scott-Heron

Poet and musician Gil Scott-Heron talks about what he meant by "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." By Skip Blumberg.

For more from this episode of PBS's "The 90's" on race and racism, check out Media Burn:

http://mediaburn.org/video/the-90s-episode-306-race-and-racism-red-white-and-black/

The revolution wasn't televised in the 60s, ugh...

is it gonna be televised in the 90s?

Well... you know the... the... the catch phrase that... what that was all about, ugh... revolution will not be televised...

that was about the fact that the first change that takes place is in your mind.

You have to change your mind before you change the way you live and the way you move.

So, when we say that the revolution will not be televised, we were saying that like...that... that... that...

the thing that is going to change people is something that no one will ever be able to capture on film.

It'll just be something that you see, and all of a sudden you realize...

I'm on the wrong page, or I'm on the right page, but on the wrong note and I've got to get in sync with everyone else to understand what's happening in this country.

Ugh huh, but I think that the Black Americans have been the... the... only real die-hard Americans here,

because we're the only ones who carried the process through the process...

that everyone else has to... sort of, like... skip stages;

we're the ones who marched, we're the ones who carried the Bible, we're the ones who carried the flag, we're the ones who had to go through the courts...

...and, and, and being born American didn't... didn't seem to matter;

because we we born Americans, but we still had to fight for what we were looking for,

and we still had to go through those challenges and those processes