Henry Louis Gates Jr. Quotes

Black people, we are fully deserving of the room and space to fully express our humanity. This is what Black Lives Matter is truly about.

Our blackness and how to survive being black in America was something that our parents instilled in us extraordinarily well.

Just as if you do a mash-up of reality from the point of view of African Americans in this country, you're going to end up with something that will say, "This is Black Lives Matter." It's not that people necessarily have started out from that premise. But if you're looking at reality, that will be the result because that is reality.

The black experience for me has been very interesting. Some days, I wake up, and I feel really black. Some days, I'm like, 'This is me. I'm black. Black Lives Matter. Black pride. Look at my cocoa skin.' I just feel it's my being.

Black artists deserve the opportunity to create work without the burden of alleviating the social ills plaguing many black communities.

The Black Lives Matter movement has to, by its very nature, be intersectional because of the complexities of who black people are in this country and throughout the world.

It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.

I went to a segregated school; I was born a Negro, not a black man.

As part of the realization of the aim to eradicate racism in our country, we must strive to create and strengthen a black capitalist class… because we come from among the black oppressed, many among us feel embarrassed to state this goal as nakedly as we should.

A race-transcendent politics is most likely to succeed when the white community takes responsibility for overcoming its racism, not when the black community decides to forget it.

The world has made being black a crime .... I hope to make it a virtue.

I don't know that white people need to be 'allies' so much as understand that any black struggle in America is ultimately a struggle for the large country. 'Ally' presumes a kind of distance that I am not sure exists.

Sammy was the only one that looked like me, so I naturally gravitated to him. Sammy made it cool to be black at a time when, let's just say it, it wasn't very cool to be black. His name was on the front of the building in lights, and he had to go in the back. But you never saw him sweat.

I think, as a black man, I have a responsibility to have knowledge and have an opinion.

I think #BlackLivesMatter is a huge campaign that is important and integral to our advancement as a people.

Through my school years, I learned more about slavery, anti-black racism, and oppression in the U.S., and my blackness could no longer be an afterthought. I started wearing it proudly, and as my consciousness deepened, so did my love for black folks.

Saying 'black lives matter' both literally and figuratively restores people's dignity.

The way black people feel, especially, is if you're going to tell a black story, let it come from a real place.

My only crime was being born black - or being born black in Alabama.

Black Lives Matter is our call to action. It is a tool to reimagine a world where black people are free to exist, free to live. It is a tool for our allies to show up differently for us.

The first thing that Black Lives Matter had to do was remind people that racism existed in this country because when we had Obama, people thought we were post-racial. That was the debate. Is racism over? And very quickly, we understood that it was not over.

I never had a moment of realization about my blackness - I just was. Blackness was a central thread of my experience as a child and as an adolescent, as it is now that I'm an adult.

As a black person, I'm used to going to places in which I might be the only black person that shows up there. This experience has an effect on the way you see yourself in the world and what it means to be black in the world.

If you're a black person in America, it's really hard to avoid being black. And what I mean is that the reality of your cultural history, regardless of whether or not you talk about it, it's there.

I've said numerous times the hardest job in America isn't being a professional athlete. It's not being a matador or having some job that puts your life at risk. The hardest job in America is being black, because it's the one thing you can't outrun.