"My goal is to get everybody in America to do their family tree." ― Henry Louis Gates Topic(s): Family More From Henry Louis Gates "The African American’s relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen’s African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa." "What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president, who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He’s been bridging divisions his whole life." "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." More In Family "One’s family is the most important thing in life. I look at it this way: One of these days I’ll be over in a hospital somewhere with four walls around me. And the only people who’ll be with me will be my family."― Robert Byrd "Action films are great, but an action film that has characters that are compelling and a story that people can care about is something even better. We love to see action heroes that are vulnerable, that are sensitive, that are family people, that are accessible."― Steven Seagal "It is no longer an unwritten law of American capitalism that industry will attempt to maintain wages at a level that allows a single wage to support a family."― Christopher Lasch