A biography for Henry Louis Gateshasn’t been written yet.
“I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians.”
“You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.”
“All of the guests on 'Faces of America' were deeply moved by what we revealed about their ancestry. We were able to trace the ancestry of Native American writer Louise Erdrich back to 438 A.D. We found that Queen Noor is descended from royalty, and that's before she married King Hussein of Jordan.”
“Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs.”
“The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?”
“It's fascinating how life works.”
“Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs. For my own people, it was important to imagine him as the Great Emancipator, the Moses who led us out of slavery.”
“I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'”
“One must learn how to be black in America.”
“Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.”
“The historical basis for the gap between the black middle class and underclass shows that ending discrimination, by itself, would not eradicate black poverty and dysfunction. We also need intervention to promulgate a middle-class ethic of success among the poor, while expanding opportunities for economic betterment.”
“I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated.”
“There's a boom in genealogy now. With ancestry.com and other sites digitizing so many of the records, you can now find things in a few minutes that used to take months.”
“Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.”
“Most black leaders, whether left, right or center, from Frederick Douglas and Martin Delaney on in the middle of the 19th century have not even wondered about the merits of the capitalist system.”
“What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.”
“Very few, if any, first-generation black or white or Asian kids will pursue a Ph.D. They'll pursue the professions for economic security. Many will go to law school and/or business school.”
“First we have to recognize that the cause of poverty is both structural and behavioral. And the first thing about the behavior part is that we need a moral revolution within the African American community. Look - no white racist makes you get pregnant when you are a black teenager.”
“Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro.”
“I'm a tech geek. Whenever I read about something new, I think to myself, How can I take this and make it black?”