As the years progress, what women and men will discover is that the most lasting and rewarding educational experiences come not from specific information provided in classroom lectures or assigned textbooks, but from the values obtained in active engagement in meaningful issues. We achieve for ourselves only as we appreciate the problems and concerns of others-and only as we see our own lives as part of a much greater social purpose.

The 'We Have Overcome' generation has run out of intellectual creativity but refuses to leave the political stage.

In the case of Alex Haley, Haley's material is located at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville, primarily. But there are a whole series of elaborate steps that one has to - has to encounter in order to even begin to do research. There's an attorney. If you want to photocopy material from that archive, you have to get permission from the attorney beforehand.

[Alex] Haley had a tendency to write even more frequently and voluminously to his agents and his editors than he did putting pen to paper in his own books.

I think that Malcolm X was the most remarkable historical figure produced by Black America in the 20th century.

[Alex] Haley felt he could make a solid case in favor of racial integration by showing what was - to white America - what was the consequence of their support for racial separatism that would end up producing a kind of hate, the hate that hate produced, to use the phrase that Mike Wallace used in his 1959 documentary on the Nation of Islam.

The guards didn't carry weapons. Malcolm X had insisted that the guards not carry firearms that day [February 21, 1965].