I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as ‘Tarzan.’ Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room – and we have to become sensitive to it. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and… Wanda Sykes and John Legend… we’re adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that’s the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
For as long as I can remember, I have been passionately intrigued by ‘Africa,’ by the word itself, by its flora and fauna, its topographical diversity and grandeur; but above all else, by the sheer variety of the colors of its people, from tan and sepia to jet and ebony. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
Keeping the Union together, freeing slaves and being assassinated all added up to creating ‘Lincoln the myth.’ He overcame a lot of his own prejudices and became what many would consider the first black man’s president. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote
The African American’s relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa. Henry Louis Gates Read Quote