Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.

In America there is institutional racism that we all inherit and participate in, like breathing the air in this room - and we have to become sensitive to it.

The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience.

The first step toward tolerance is respect and the first step toward respect is knowledge.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

In Ethiopia, the black people became Christians 1700 years ago, hundreds of years before Northern Europe turned to Christianity... And here, most of the saints are black.

We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.

I want to be a figure for prison reform. I think that the criminal justice system is rotten.

Censorship is to art as lynching is to justice.

Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.

Well, certainly one of the ironies of the success of affirmative action is that the middle class within the black community no longer lives within 'black community' by and large.

There is madness in the heart of a man.

English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.

Harder still was the pretense her studies demanded: the need to dissemble, to parrot her professors' orthodoxies, to feign interest in theories that were of no use to her.

Television: The word is half Greek, half Latin. No good can come of it.

As an actor, no matter what, you're at the whim of so many other people all the time.

I feel like I'm getting better as a writer and as a singer and that there is more to discover there, so hopefully other people feel that way too without having to disassociate with the earlier work.

What draws me to theater and religion are these rituals made to make you feel emotion. It's so banal in an interesting way. In visual art it's about making you feel emotional, but it's more subtle.

I myself think that to have a cat is more important than to have a Bible.

Individuality in dressing is not important to men. If they all look alike it means they haven't made a mistake.

Whatever we, as prospective participants unaware of our specific features, would desire society to be like is what, morally speaking, we ought to institute.