"Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice."
"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."
"In fact, the class divide in the black community is now seen by some as a permanent aspect of our existence."
"The Right insists that anyone can escape poverty by working hard but that is simply not the case."
"Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am."
"You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it."
"One must learn how to be black in America."
"I didn't feel particularly close to my father."
"It's fascinating how life works."
"What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories."
"My brother and I had a really privileged relationship with my parents... They treated us like adults."
"I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement."
"I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated."
"Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time."
"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."
"Brazil is the second blackest nation in the world."
"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."
"In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black."
"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."
"Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same."
"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."
"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."
"It turns out one of my ancestors fought in the Continental Army, so I was inducted into the Sons of the American Revolution."
"There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees."
"My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree."
