Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes

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.

You have to have a canon so the next generation can come along and explode it.

You have a diasporic black world, and the only way to put it back together again is symbolic. It’s like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever could edit the ‘Encyclopedia Africana’ would provide symbolic order to the fragments created over the past 500 years. That is a major contribution.

You can say I had a severe case of ‘Roots’ envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to… do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

You can find virtually everybody black back as far as the 1870 census. Why 1870? That’s when the ex-slaves first have surnames. But if you find your great-great-grandfather in 1870 and it says he’s 50, that means he was born in 1820 and you’re back to 1820 already. For an American that’s pretty damned good, you know?

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.