Alive Quote by Mark Twain

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

My parents came from the south. So their ancestors were actually slaves in this country.

— Isaac Wright Jr

I had ancestors who were slave-holders, which is a difficult piece of family history to say the least. In a recent New York Times…

— Laura Lippman

My mother's family came from the British West Indies. And my father's family came from, well, my father's father came from the Montana/South Dakota…

— Richie Havens

Unless you're one of the first Americans, a Native American, you came from someplace else. Somebody brought you.

— Barack Obama

I am first-generation American, so I didn't grow up in the South or have any relatives who were slaves. My forefathers were colonized.

— Adina Porter

I remember when I first came to America, nobody had a clue what a black Englishman was. I was either South African or Australian…

— Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje

We are African in origin and American in birth.

— Timothy Thomas Fortune

The first American ancestor of our name was a younger son of these old Devonshire people, and came to the Virginia colony in the…

— John Sergeant Wise

I'm black and Cuban, Australian and Irish, and like most people in America, I'm someone whose roots come from somewhere else. I'm a mixed…

— Soledad O'Brien

Even if you're on the right track, you'll get run over if you just sit there. My folks were Indian. Both my mother and…

— Will Rogers

When asked by an anthropologist what the Indians called America before the white men came, an Indian said simply "Ours.

— Vine Deloria Jr