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.

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.

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

Fortunately, in President Obama, the child of an African and an American, we finally have a leader who is uniquely positioned to bridge the great reparations divide.

Without doubt, President [Barack] Obama is a great historical figure.

I think that is what we do by preserving and telling our stories. If you don't tell your stories, other people will tell their story about you. It's important that we nurture and protect these memories. Things change. Existence means change. So, the kind of precious memories about being black for my generation won't exist for my kids' and grandkids' generations unless we preserve them through fiction, through film, through comic books, and every other form of media we can possibly utilize to perpetuate the story of the great African-American people.

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?