If America Has A Civic Religion, The

The Thing About Black History Is That The Truth Is So Much More Complex Than Anything You Could Make Up.

All Of The Guests On 'faces Of America' Were Deeply Moved By What We Revealed About Their Ancestry. We Were Able To Trace The Ancestry Of Native American Writer Louise Erdrich Back To 438 A.d. We Found That Queen Noor Is Descended From Royalty, And That's Before She Married King Hussein Of Jordan.

Dr. King's Nobel Prize Had A More Powerful Transforming Effect On Him Than I Think He Realized At The Time.

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.

I Rebel At The Notion That I Can't Be Part Of Other Groups, That I Can't Construct Identities Through Elective Affinity, That Race Must Be The Most Important Thing About Me. Is That What I Want On My Gravestone: Here Lies An African American?