My Grandfather Was Coloured, My Father Was

First We Have To Recognize That The Cause Of Poverty Is Both Structural And Behavioral. And The First Thing About The Behavior Part Is That We Need A Moral Revolution Within The African American Community. Look - No White Racist Makes You Get Pregnant When You Are A Black Teenager.

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.

Mama And I Would Go To A Funeral And She'd Stand Up To Read The Dead Person's Eulogy. She Made The Ignorant And Ugly Sound Like Scholars And Movie Stars, Turned The Mean And Evil Into Saints And Angels. She Knew What People Had Meant To Be In Their Hearts, Not What The World Had Forced Them To Become. She Knew The Ways In Which Working Too Hard For Paltry Wages Could Turn You Mean And Cold, Could Kill The Thing That Made You Laugh.

My Producers And I Worked With These Consultants And Came Up With Seventy [stories] Which We Think Are Exemplary Of The Larger Arc Of African-american History Between 1513 And 2013. We Covered Half A Millennium, And It's Amazing.

The Sad Truth Is That The Civil Rights Movement Cannot Be Reborn Until We Identify The Causes Of Black Suffering, Some Of Them Self-inflicted. Why Can't Black Leaders Organize Rallies Around Responsible Sexuality, Birth Within Marriage, Parents Reading To Their Children And Students Staying In School And Doing Homework?