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" Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am. "

Henry Louis Gates

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" You can find virtually everybody black back as far as the 1870 census. Why 1870? That's when the ex-slaves first have surnames. But if you find your great-great-grandfather in 1870 and it says he's 50, that means he was born in 1820 and you're back to 1820 already. For an American that's pretty damned good, you know? "

Henry Louis Gates

" One principle I've been fighting for that doesn't endear me to a lot of people is that black people can be just as complicated and screwed up as white people. Our motives can be just as base and violent. Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you. "

Henry Louis Gates

" If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case. "

Henry Louis Gates

" You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It's like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the 'Encyclopedia Africana' would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution. "

Henry Louis Gates

" My father lived to be 97 and played bridge every day up to the end, so I've got a 50 percent chance of living a long life like him. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" Let's face it - think of Africa, and the first images that come to mind are of war, poverty, famine and flies. How many of us really know anything at all about the truly great ancient African civilizations, which in their day, were just as splendid and glorious as any on the face of the earth? "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" A more humane form of capitalism is about the best I think we can get. Which might sound very reformist or conservative, but that's basically where I am. "

Henry Louis Gates

" If you share a common ancestor with somebody, you're related to them. It doesn't mean that you're going to invite them to the family reunion, but it means that you share DNA. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same. "

Henry Louis Gates

" The Western stereotype of Africa and its black citizens as devoid of reason and, therefore, subhuman was often shared by white master and black ex-slave alike. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice. "

Henry Louis Gates

" Cuba is like going to a whole other planet. It's so different but it's so similar to the United States, to Miami. It's like a doppelgaenger. It's the mirror image. And I have no doubt, that once Cuba becomes democratic, that it will be the favorite tourist destination for Americans. "

Henry Louis Gates

" My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree. "

Henry Louis Gates

" It's no surprise that White people say things when they are together about Black people. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" 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

" 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

African-American

" I would like to do a series about sequencing the human genome, and also analyze more human diversity among other ethnic groups - a 'Faces of America 2.' "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" My father and I made genetics history. We were the first African-Americans and the first father and son anywhere to have their genomes sequenced. "

Henry Louis Gates

" We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about. "

Henry Louis Gates

" It's important to debunk the myths of Africa being this benighted continent civilized only when white people arrived. In fact, Africans had been creators of culture for thousands of years before. These were very intelligent, subtle and sophisticated people, with organized societies and great art. "

Henry Louis Gates

" You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa. "

Henry Louis Gates

" 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

" I'm a tech geek. "

Henry Louis Gates