We have chaos reigning in the Middle East. There is a great deal of instability. In the past, people would have turned to their church, and some still do. Counterintuitively, people are now turning into themselves to find their roots. The way you do that is through your family tree. "Where did I come from?" There is an urge to preserve the names of the people who produced you.

Instill respect for teachers.

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

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

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?

Patriotism is best exemplified through auto-critique.

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