Most of us prefer to be as quiet as possible about giving, because every time it's publicized that we do something, if it's something of the nature of giving, we'll be doubly besieged, and you really get sick of being always criticized no matter what you do.

Indeed optimists rather than defeatists have produced the results for which serious genealogical research is best known.

When you start about family, about lineage and ancestry, you are talking about every person on earth.

I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books.

The anti-blackness has generated new forms of youth involvement in anti-whiteness, which in some cases is appalling.

In all of us there is a hunger, marrow-deep, to know our heritage, to know who we are and where we came from.

There was a great deal of inbreeding between the Indians and the slaves. Genetically speaking, black people are some part black, some part European.