Lincoln Had A Tremendous Capacity For Personal

No One Thinks Of Mexico And Peru As Black. But Mexico And Peru Together Got 700,000 Africans In The Slave Trade. The Coast Of Acapulco Was A Black City In The 1870s. And The Veracruz Coast On The Gulf Of Mexico And The Costa Chica, South Of Acapulco Are Traditional Black Lands.

We Have Chaos Reigning In The Middle East. There Is A Great Deal Of Instability. In The Past, People Would Have Turned To Their Church, And Some Still Do. Counterintuitively, People Are Now Turning Into Themselves To Find Their Roots. The Way You Do That Is Through Your Family Tree. "where Did I Come From?" There Is An Urge To Preserve The Names Of The People Who Produced You.

My Father, If Anything, First And Last, Was A Man Of Words. He Loved Stories; He Didn't Live For Stories, Exactly, But I Think He Lived Through Stories. I Think, Like Many Writers, He Loved Stories About Things He Had Experienced As Much As, If Not More Than, He Loved The Experiences Themselves.

America Is The Greatest Nation Ever Founded. The Ideals Are The Greatest Ever Espoused In Human History, And We Just Need The Country To Live Up To Them. But What I Worry About Are The 1 Million Black Men In The Prison System.

In A One-hour Documentary, You Can Tell Maybe Ten Stories. That's How The Documentary Is Structured. I Wrote To Forty Of The Greatest Historians Of Both African And African-american History, And Hired Them As Consultants. I Had Them Submit What They Thought Were The Indispensable Stories, The Ones They Felt This Series Absolutely Had To Include.