What I have learned is that a whole lot of people with degrees don't know a damn thing, and a lot of people with no degrees are brilliant.

History is a compass that you locate yourself on the map of human geography, politically, culturally, financially.

If you struck your mother or your father, it was punishable by death because you struck at the whole society. You struck at the morality of the society itself. This is what we have lost.

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.

If we are going to be masters of our destiny, we must be masters of the ideas that influence that destiny.

If people do not know where they have been and what they have been they don't know what they are. They don't know where they going to have to go or where they still have to be.

We probably have, right now, after the Civil Rights movement - and this was very unfortunate - the most glaring time of giving up on Africa, saying we're Americans. We are Americans. I'm not arguing that point. So are the Italians. So are the Germans. So are the Jews. We're Americans with an historical geography of origins outside of the United States as all people, maybe except the indigenous Americans who came here so long ago, who have generations of people whose historical origins are right here but whose initial historical origins are somewhere in Asia.