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. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
The Dominican Republic says ‘We’re black behind the ears.’ And in Mexico, ‘there’s a black grandma in the closet.’ They know, they’ve just been intermarrying for a long time. But if we did the DNA of everyone in Mexico a whole lot of people would have a whole lot of black in them. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
Color categories are on steroids in Latin America. I find that fascinating. It’s very difficult for Americans, particularly African-Americans to understand or sympathize with. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity… And here, most of the saints are black. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote