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" 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
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" Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President. "
Henry Louis Gates
Other
American
Growth
" Lincoln would love the fact that Obama is such a great conciliator, trying to transcend ideology. "
Henry Louis Gates
Great
Trying
Love
" 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
Experience
Trees
Tree
" Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time. "
Henry Louis Gates
Time
Think
Powerful
" 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
Father
First
Genetics
" 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
Destination
Mirror
Miami
" Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide. "
Henry Louis Gates
Bridge
Child
Great
" 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
" I rebel at the notion that I can't be part of other groups, that I can't construct identities through elective affinity, that race must be the most important thing about me. Is that what I want on my gravestone: Here lies an African American? "
Henry Louis Gates
Me
Race
Rebel
" 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
" 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
" You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it. "
Henry Louis Gates
Come
Along
You
" 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
Day
War
Think
" 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
" 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
End
Bridge
Chance
" 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
" 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
" I'm looking forward to the time when we all look like Polynesians. "
Henry Louis Gates
Looking
Looking Forward
Time
" No one thinks of Mexico and Peru as black. But Mexico and Peru together got 700,000 Africans in the slave trade. The coast of Acapulco was a black city in the 1870s. And the Veracruz Coast on the gulf of Mexico and the Costa Chica, south of Acapulco are traditional black lands. "
Henry Louis Gates
Trade
Black
City
" 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
Culture
Want
Black
" Since the day Martin Luther King was killed, the black middle classes have almost quadrupled, but the percentage of black children living on or below the poverty line is almost the same. "
Henry Louis Gates
Poverty
King
Day
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
Revolution
Community
Black
" 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
Reason
Africa
Black
" Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique. When you're willing to stand up within the group and say, 'It is wrong for Black people to be anti-Semitic,' or 'It is wrong for America to discriminate against persons of African descent and made them slaves and based its wealth upon free labor,' it's crucial to say that. "
Henry Louis Gates
People
Black
Patriotism
" I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten. "
Henry Louis Gates
Prison
Think
Want
" 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
" 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
Black
Suffering
People
" 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
" 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. "
Henry Louis Gates
Black
Security
School
" 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
Ship
Tree
You