Instill Respect For Teachers.

My Earliest Childhood Memory Is Of My Father Going Crazy When The Giants Won The World Series In 1954. He Started Whoopin' And Hollerin' And Jumpin' Up And Down All Around The Living Room. I Started Crying Because He Scared Me To Death.

We Must Begin To Understand The Nature Of Intertextuality . . . The Manner By Which Texts Poems And Novels Respond To Other Texts. After All, All Cats May Be Black At Night, But Not To Other Cats.

I Find That People Today Tend To Use Them Interchangeably. I Use African-american, Because I Teach African Studies As Well As African-american Studies, So It's Easy, Neat And Convenient. But Sometimes, When You're In A Barber Shop, Somebody'll Say, "did You See What That Negro Did?" A Lot Of People Slip In And Out Of Different Terms Effortlessly, And I Don't Think The Thought Police Should Be On Patrol.

Insofar As We, Critics Of The Black Tradition, Master Our Craft, We Serve Both To Preserve Our Own Traditions And To Shape Their Direction. All Great Writers Demand Great Critics.

Precisely That, Covering 500 Years Of African-american History In Six Hours. I've Been Working On This For Seven Years. The Biggest Challenge Was Deciding Which Stories To Tell.