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" Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same. "
Henry Louis Gates
Roots
Ancestry
Same
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" 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
Community
City
Attitude
" It's very lonely being a prominent black intellectual at an institution where you're the only prominent black intellectual. That was the model that was followed in the late 60s when black studies started. You'd get one here and one there and one here, like Johnny Appleseed. "
Henry Louis Gates
Intellectual
Black
Late
" 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? "
Henry Louis Gates
Children
Truth Is
Truth
" The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched. "
Henry Louis Gates
Line
Tree
African-American
" 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
Business
World
Truth Is
" Diversity doesn't mean black and white only. "
Henry Louis Gates
White
Diversity
Black
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
System
Black
Right
" So, Mexico, Brazil, they wanted their national culture to be 'blackish' - really brown, a beautiful brown blend. And finally, I discovered that in each of these societies the people at the bottom are the darkest skinned with the most African features. "
Henry Louis Gates
Culture
Darkest
People
" It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that. "
Henry Louis Gates
White
Black
Class
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
She
American
Queen
" I give a speech to the black freshmen at Harvard each year, and I say, 'You can like Mozart and ice hockey...' - and then I used to say 'golf,' but Tiger took over golf! - 'and Picasso and still be as black as the ace of spades.' "
Henry Louis Gates
Tiger
You
Speech
" You notice patterns. White guests often are mortified - that word again - when they learn their ancestors owned slaves. But I've never had a black guest who was upset to learn about white ancestry that probably involved forced sexual relations. "
Henry Louis Gates
Black
Learn
White
" There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery. "
Henry Louis Gates
Two
Slavery
Always
" In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white. "
Henry Louis Gates
Drop
Black
America
" 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
America
Understand
Very
" My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn't live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves. "
Henry Louis Gates
Live
Think
Words
" My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.' "
Henry Louis Gates
Queen
Thought
Movies
" I think that the roots of racism have always been economic, and I think people are desperate and scared. And when you're desperate and scared you scapegoat people. It exacerbates latent tendencies toward - well, toward racism or homophobia or anti-Semitism. "
Henry Louis Gates
People
You
Well
" 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
Before
Here
Most
" I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement. "
Henry Louis Gates
Think
Movement
Rights
" I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated. "
Henry Louis Gates
Been
Appreciated
I Think
" The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass. "
Henry Louis Gates
Class
New
Black
" If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race. "
Henry Louis Gates
Race
Need
Say
" 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
Diversity
People
Remember
" All historians generalize from particulars. And often, if you look at a historian's footnotes, the number of examples of specific cases is very, very small. "
Henry Louis Gates
Small
You
Historians
" People don't realize what a brilliant politician Lincoln was. Looking back, we want to ascribe a level of providence to his every decision but he was a cunning and calculating politician; from the cultivation of his image as a hayseed from Illinois, to his ability to keep this country together under dire circumstances. "
Henry Louis Gates
Looking Back
People
Decision
" Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried. "
Henry Louis Gates
People
History
Lost
" 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
Relationship
Black
American
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
Values
Generation
Immigrant
" But you see, our society is still trapped in this binary, black/white logic and that has had some very positive implications for our generation. It's had some very negative ones as well and one of the negative ones is that it creates enormous identity problems for people who have one black ancestor and all white ancestors for example. "
Henry Louis Gates
You
Society
Identity