Henry Louis Gates famous quotes

The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience,
-- Henry Louis Gates

#America #People #Growth

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

#War #Thinking #Civilization

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Attitude #Kids #Cities

In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of the saints are black.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Christian #Years #Europe

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Inspirational #Black History #Black

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

#Color #Diversity #Long

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Thinking #Justice #Rotten

Everything my mother and father did was designed to put me where I am.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Mother #Father #Mother And Father

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

#Kings #Children #Class

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

#Order #Color #Humanity

For black America needs a politics whose first mission isn't the reinforcement of the idea of black America; and a discourse of race that isn't centrally concerned with preserving the idea of race and racial unanimity. We need something we don't yet have: a way of speaking about black poverty that doesn't falsify the reality of black advancement; a way of speaking about black advancement that doesn't distort the enduring realities of black poverty.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Reality #Race #Ideas

Arnold Rampersad's stunningly revealing biography has, at long last, unveiled-in magisterial prose-the very complex and vulnerable man behind Ralph Ellison's own masks and myths. One of the nation's most brilliant writers emerges as all the more fascinating precisely because he was so very human. Painstakingly researched and compellingly written, Ralph Ellison is a masterwork of the genre of literary biography.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Men #Long #Biographies

My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena, Queen of the Jungle.'
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Queens #Character #Saws

Conspiracy theories are an irresistible labor-saving device in the face of complexity.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Saving #Faces #Conspiracy

The Dominican Republic says 'We're black behind the ears.' And in Mexico, 'there's a black grandma in the closet.' They know, they've just been intermarrying for a long time. But if we did the DNA of everyone in Mexico a whole lot of people would have a whole lot of black in them.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Grandma #Dna #Long

Because Lincoln is so closely identified with what it is to be American, everyone wants to claim him, to rewrite his story to satisfy their own particular needs.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Needs #Stories #Want

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

#Lying #Race #African American

I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Birthday #Father #Boys

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

#Mirrors #Doubt #Miami

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.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#White #Our Generation #People

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

#Numbers #Example #Looks

My mom, God rest her soul - she liked nicknames. In the womb she named me Skip. There was another black guy in Piedmont, W.Va., and his name was Skip. They called him Big Skip, and I was Little Skip.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Mom #Names #Guy

If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Kings #Class #Rights

People who own property feel a sense of ownership in their future and their society. They study, save, work, strive and vote. And people trapped in a culture of tenancy do not.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#People #Culture #Study

There haven't been fundamental structural changes in America. There's been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Nice #America #People

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 #Son #African American

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

#Song #Voice #Goal

The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Tolerance #Firsts #Steps

An impressively researched and documented collection of the finest thought produced by writers throughout the African Diaspora. A magnificent achievement.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Achievement #Diaspora #Finest

America is the greatest nation ever founded. The ideals are the greatest ever espoused in human history, and we just need the country to live up to them. But what I worry about are the 1 million black men in the prison system.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Country #Men #America

The thing about living in a village at the foot of a mountain is that the world for you becomes, without thinking about it, self-contained. People are of two kinds, really: from the Valley, and from Elsewhere.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Thinking #Self #Class

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

#Children #School #Mean

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

#Class #Rights #Ironic

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

#Tree #Databases #Doe

What's fascinated me from the time I was a little kid was the way we construct our lives through stories.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Kids #Stories #Littles

There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Tree #Stories #Buried

Dr. King's Nobel Prize had a more powerful transforming effect on him than I think he realized at the time.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Kings #Powerful #Thinking

Politicians will not put forth programs aimed at the problems of poor blacks while their turnout remains so low.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Problem #Politician #Poor

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

#Men #Philadelphia #Long

I think that the roots of racism have always been economic, and I think people are desperate and scared. And when you're desperate and scared you scapegoat people. It exacerbates latent tendencies toward - well, toward racism or homophobia or anti-Semitism.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Thinking #Roots #Racism

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

#Teenager #White #Community

The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Tree #African American #Lines

So many people of color who made major contributions to American history have been trapped in the purgatory of history.
-- Henry Louis Gates

#Color #People #American History