You have to convince the adults that if a child is to learn his culture, he or she will have to see his mother and father reading about it, and explaining it to him. Then it gets a legitimacy it otherwise would never have. Until then, his learning is limited.

There has been a struggle to reclaim the African self. That struggle has been on the part of a minority of dedicated African-Americans who never gave up our African identity at no time during our stay here.

The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.

I make a special point of working on Thanksgiving Day. I have friends I go out with but I even make it plain to them. The standard reason for Thanksgiving doesn't mean nothing to me.

I'm one of the people who believes that our losses were greater than our gains. Because before the Civil Rights movement we had entrepreneurship in the black community. Right now, in Harlem, if I wanted to get a shoe repaired, I would have a hard time finding a black shoe repairman. On near about every third corner, you could find a decent black barber, decent black laundry, had restaurants in the neighborhood that were open 24 hours. The food was good at 3 o'clock in the morning as at 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

Clowns don't build institutions, nor do boxers.

The population of African people in the United States is far in excess of six small European nations. Where we are going? We have to go back as best we can to where slavery and colonialism took us from. And they took us from a concept of nation management and nation maintenance. We have been so long away from home we unfortunately have forgotten how we ruled states before the foreigners got there.