The first slave to read and write was the first to run away.

There's a boom in genealogy now. With ancestry.com and other sites digitizing so many of the records, you can now find things in a few minutes that used to take months.

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.

I thought, "why don't we be innovative and create something nobody had ever done before?" It was a huge hit and we immediately did a sequel with Chris Rock, Morgan Freeman, Tina Turner and Maya Angelou.

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

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

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black. In Brazil, it's almost as if one drop of white ancestry makes you white.