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.

There are two things that have always haunted me: the brutality of the European traders and the stories I've heard about Africans selling other Africans into slavery.

I want to be remembered as someone who tried to bring the story of our ancestors to the broadest possible audience. I want to be remembered as a man who loved his race.

Everybody wants to have sex - you don't have to have a baby when you're 16. You don't have to do drugs. I think our Sunday schools should be turned into Black history schools and computer schools on the weekend, just like Hebrew schools for Jewish people, or my Asian friends who send their kids to schools on the weekend to learn Chinese or Korean.

Kansas City Lightning succeeds as few biographies of jazz musicians have. . . This book is a magnificent achievement; I could hardly put it down.

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.

The more you learn about yourself and your family tree, your self-esteem goes up. They will learn archival skills, historical analysis and science skills. You learn all this in the most seductive way, and that is through learning about yourself. Who doesn't like talking about themselves? It doesn't seem like science or history, it's just fun.