I Think Literacy Is Everything.

I Think That Is What We Do By Preserving And Telling Our Stories. If You Don't Tell Your Stories, Other People Will Tell Their Story About You. It's Important That We Nurture And Protect These Memories. Things Change. Existence Means Change. So, The Kind Of Precious Memories About Being Black For My Generation Won't Exist For My Kids' And Grandkids' Generations Unless We Preserve Them Through Fiction, Through Film, Through Comic Books, And Every Other Form Of Media We Can Possibly Utilize To Perpetuate The Story Of The Great African-american People.

I Give A Speech To The Black Freshmen At Harvard Each Year, And I Say, "you Can Like Mozart And Ice Hockey..." - And Then I Used To Say "golf," But Tiger Took Over Golf! - "and Picasso And Still Be As Black As The Ace Of Spades."

Our Society Is Driven Today By So Much Ethnic Discord. We Have Black Lives Matter, Which I Praise And Celebrate. We Have The Demagogues Stereotyping Muslims And Resurrecting Racist Stereotypes They Used To Visit On Us. The Larger Goal Is To Show That We Are All The Same, We All Come From Africa, And We All Have The Same Larger Family Tree. It's About The Fundamental Unity Of The Human Community.

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.

There's A Boom In Genealogy Now. With Ancestry.com And Other Sites Digitizing So Many Of The Records, You Can Now Find Things In A Few Minutes That Used To Take Months.