African American Lives is a PBS television miniseries hosted by historian Henry Louis Gates, Jr., focusing on African American genealogical research. The family histories of prominent African Americans are explored using traditional genealogic techniques as well as genetic analysis.
Gates has written an associated book, In Search of Our Roots: How 19 Extraordinary African Americans Reclaimed Their Past, which was published in early 2009.
Read more about African American Lives: African American Lives, African American Lives 2, Criticism
Famous quotes containing the words african american, african, american and/or lives:
“I never feel so conscious of my race as I do when I stand before a class of twenty-five young men and women eager to learn about what it is to be black in America.”
—Claire Oberon Garcia, African American college professor. As quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B3 (July 27, 1994)
“Exploitation and oppression is not a matter of race. It is the system, the apparatus of world-wide brigandage called imperialism, which made the Powers behave the way they did. I have no illusions on this score, nor do I believe that any Asian nation or African nation, in the same state of dominance, and with the same system of colonial profit-amassing and plunder, would have behaved otherwise.”
—Han Suyin (b. 1917)
“Mighty few young black women are doin’ domestic work. And I’m glad. That’s why I want my kids to go to school. This one lady told me, “All you people are gettin’ like that.” I said, “I’m glad.” There’s no more gettin’ on their knees.”
—Maggie Holmes, African American domestic worker. As quoted in Working, book 3, by Studs Terkel (1973)
“These men had no need to travel to be as wise as Solomon in all his glory, so similar are the lives of men in all countries, and fraught with the same homely experiences. One half the world knows how the other half lives.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)