104 Quotes by Henry Louis Gates Jr.

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.

Learning to sing one’s own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own’s voices, is also the goal of any writer.

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.

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

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.

Ever since I watched ‘Roots,’ I’ve dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.

There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.

I want to get into the educational DNA of American culture. I want 10 percent of the common culture, more or less, to be black.

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