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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
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Henry Louis Gates
Age: 74
Born: 1950
Born: September 16
Critic
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Literary Critic
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West Virginia
Henry Louis Gates
Contribution
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America
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More quotes by Henry Louis Gates
If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change.
Henry Louis Gates
My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.
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
Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.
Henry Louis Gates
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
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
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
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.
Henry Louis Gates
The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
Henry Louis Gates
We must begin to understand the nature of intertextuality . . . the manner by which texts poems and novels respond to other texts. After all, all cats may be black at night, but not to other cats.
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
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
Diversity doesn't mean black and white only.
Henry Louis Gates
Lincoln had a tremendous capacity for personal growth - more than any other American President.
Henry Louis Gates
I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.
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
Suffering does not necessarily ennoble you.
Henry Louis Gates
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.
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
The genius is making a way out of no way.
Henry Louis Gates
