You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

We really invented the genre of tracing family trees and going back as far as we could on the paper trail. When the paper trail disappeared, we used DNA analysis. The technology was just being invented that allowed you to trace ancestry through DNA.

In America one drop of black ancestry makes you black.

My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree.

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

The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.

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.