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When Europeans came upon real ruined cities they refused to believe that they had been built by Africans. Here the past has been distorted and denied.

Henry Louis Gates

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Henry Louis Gates
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 16
Critic
Essayist
Genealogist
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
University Teacher
Writer
Keyser
West Virginia
Henry Louis Gates
Real
Refused
Believe
Ruined
Denied
Built
Cities
Came
Africans
Upon
Distorted
Past
Europeans

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So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.
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The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
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I think literacy is everything.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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I want to be remembered as someone who tried to bring the story of our ancestors to the broadest possible audience. I want to be remembered as a man who loved his race.
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We have to stop making excuses. One of the things that I'm careful to show is the horrendous effects of institutional and structural racism, but in the end, you can't wait for white man or a Black man to come riding in on a white horse to save you. We have to save ourselves, and that's the lesson of The African Americans.
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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.
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You should not pick an occupation because your think your parents want you to do it, or because you think it's the noble thing to do. You should only pick a job because it turns you on.
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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.
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My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.
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My producers and I worked with these consultants and came up with seventy [stories] which we think are exemplary of the larger arc of African-American history between 1513 and 2013. We covered half a millennium, and it's amazing.
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In 1957, when I was in second grade, black children integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. We watched it on TV. All of us watched it. I don't mean Mama and Daddy and Rocky. I mean all the colored people in America watched it, together, with one set of eyes.
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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.
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Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.
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Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.
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What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
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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.
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In a one-hour documentary, you can tell maybe ten stories. That's how the documentary is structured. I wrote to forty of the greatest historians of both African and African-American history, and hired them as consultants. I had them submit what they thought were the indispensable stories, the ones they felt this series absolutely had to include.
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