American Quote by Henry Louis Gates

It's impossible for most black Americans to construct full family trees. Official census records, used by so many genealogy enthusiasts to piece together their…

— Jesmyn Ward

I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to…

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

One of the things that's interesting about black culture is we don't know about our heritage and about our genealogy because it was taken…

— Xavier Woods

“By 1870, roughly 284,000 blacks accounted for 12 percent of the population of sixteen Western states and territories. But Negroes actually show up as…

— Nicholas Johnson

There's a lot of black history - my history - that I don't know about.

— Alison Hammond

Use Black History month as an opportunity to tell your family history as far back as you can go.

— Anonymous

Most of the ancestors that I can trace were born here in the United States of America. And then it goes back to slavery.…

— Herman Cain

Thousand years ago, we all descended from Africans who left the continent. Those ancestors, we will never know their name. We can go back…

— Henry Louis Gates

I carry in my datebook a piece of paper that my mother copied out for me, from the 1840 Census. Hardy Callaway Culver of…

— Laura Lippman

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, in a time and place where no one was saying, Look how far weve come, because…

— Kathryn Stockett

Black college-educated people got to where they are on the backs of domestic help, meaning their parents and grandparents. So people should not forget…

— Esther Rolle

The Afrocentric exploration of the black past only scratches the surface. A full examination of the ancestry of those who are referred to in…

— Ishmael Reed