Suffering Does Not Necessarily Ennoble You.

You Have A Diasporic Black World, And The Only Way To Put It Back Together Again Is Symbolic. It's Like Humpty Dumpty. Whoever Could Edit The 'encyclopedia Africana' Would Provide Symbolic Order To The Fragments Created Over The Past 500 Years. That Is A Major Contribution.

Arnold Rampersad's Stunningly Revealing Biography Has, At Long Last, Unveiled-in Magisterial Prose-the Very Complex And Vulnerable Man Behind Ralph Ellison's Own Masks And Myths. One Of The Nation's Most Brilliant Writers Emerges As All The More Fascinating Precisely Because He Was So Very Human. Painstakingly Researched And Compellingly Written, Ralph Ellison Is A Masterwork Of The Genre Of Literary Biography.

You Can Say I Had A Severe Case Of 'roots' Envy. I Wanted To Be Like Alex Haley, And I Wanted To Be Able To... Do My Family Tree Back To The Slave Ship And Then Reverse The Middle Passage, As I Like To Put It, And Find The Tribe Or Ethnic Group That I Was From In Africa.

It's Important To Debunk The Myths Of Africa Being This Benighted Continent Civilized Only When White People Arrived. In Fact, Africans Had Been Creators Of Culture For Thousands Of Years Before. These Were Very Intelligent, Subtle And Sophisticated People, With Organized Societies And Great Art.

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.