One Must Learn How To Be Black

It's Important To Debunk The Myths Of Africa Being This Benighted Continent Civilized Only When White People Arrived. In Fact, Africans Had Been Creators Of Culture For Thousands Of Years Before. These Were Very Intelligent, Subtle And Sophisticated People, With Organized Societies And Great Art.

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.

In 1957, When I Was In Second Grade, Black Children Integrated Central High School In Little Rock, Arkansas. We Watched It On Tv. All Of Us Watched It. I Don't Mean Mama And Daddy And Rocky. I Mean All The Colored People In America Watched It, Together, With One Set Of Eyes.

My Producers And I Worked With These Consultants And Came Up With Seventy [stories] Which We Think Are Exemplary Of The Larger Arc Of African-american History Between 1513 And 2013. We Covered Half A Millennium, And It's Amazing.

The Historical Basis For The Gap Between The Black Middle Class And Underclass Shows That Ending Discrimination, By Itself, Would Not Eradicate Black Poverty And Dysfunction. We Also Need Intervention To Promulgate A Middle-class Ethic Of Success Among The Poor, While Expanding Opportunities For Economic Betterment.