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

The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience.

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

Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro.

Precisely that, covering 500 years of African-American history in six hours. I've been working on this for seven years. The biggest challenge was deciding which stories to tell.

The precise form of an individual's activity is determined, of course, by the equipment with which he came into the world. In other words, it is determined by his heredity.

My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.