"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."

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

"Very few, if any, first-generation black or white or Asian kids will pursue a Ph.D. They'll pursue the professions for economic security. Many will go to law school and/or business school."

"I first learned that there were black people living in some place called other than the United States in the western hemisphere when I was a very little boy, and my father told me that when he was a boy about my age, he wanted to be an Episcopal priest, because he so admired his priest, a black man from someplace called Haiti."

"All the learnin' my father paid for was a bit o' birch at one end and an alphabet at the other."

"Like family, we are tied to each other. This is what all good musicians understand."

"One of the greatest titles in the world is parent, and one of the biggest blessings in the world is to have parents to call mom and dad."

"In my family, we were Americans, we were Republicans and we were Methodists."