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Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.
Henry Louis Gates
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Henry Louis Gates
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 16
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West Virginia
Henry Louis Gates
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More quotes by Henry Louis Gates
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
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
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
I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.
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
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
I knew that there were black people in Africa, of course, unfortunately because of movies such as 'Tarzan.'
Henry Louis Gates
The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.
Henry Louis Gates
I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.
Henry Louis Gates
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
It is the black poet who bridges the gap in tradition, who modifies tradition when experience demands it, who translates experience into meaning and meaning into belief.
Henry Louis Gates
I use African-American, because I teach African Studies as well as African-American Studies, so it's easy, neat and convenient. But sometimes, when you're in a barber shop, somebody'll say, Did you see what that Negro did? A lot of people slip in and out of different terms effortlessly, and I don't think the thought police should be on patrol.
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
If America has a civic religion, the First Amendment is its central article of faith.
Henry Louis Gates
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
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
So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.
Henry Louis Gates
Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
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
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
