Jesmyn Ward Quotes

Ever since I watched 'Roots,' I've dreamed of tracing my African ancestry and helping other people do the same.

My knowledge of my ancestry, like a lot of black people not living in Africa today, is very vague.

I am proud of my black roots and of the black blood that runs in my veins.

The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.

To the best of my knowledge and of my effort, every lineage statement within 'Roots' is from either my African or American families' carefully preserved oral history, much of which I have been able conventionally to corroborate with documents.

The 22 million or 30 million, whatever the case may be, Afro-Americans in the United States were still Africans.

I find my husband's family history fascinating, as they can trace the family lineage back to ancestors who fought, and died, in the first battle of the Revolution, as well as to many other interesting people.

When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South America is America. Central America is America. South America has many people in it of African descent.

I've always been fascinated by family ancestry.

The book begins and ends with the visits to give the impression of a tunnel into their ancestors and family history. I believe in going backwards into the past - I felt I was digging a tunnel back to the past.

In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.

But the most precious research to me came from the paperwork filed on behalf of my grandparents and great-grandfather. The ship's manifest showed that they could read and write. I am still emotional when I look at those boxes checked yes.

Genealogy is among the fastest-growing leisure pursuits in the U.K. Indeed, the urge to uncover the truth about our ancestors has proved so compelling that, when the 1901 census first went online, the website crashed after a million people logged on within hours of its launch.

You can find virtually everybody black back as far as the 1870 census. Why 1870? That's when the ex-slaves first have surnames. But if you find your great-great-grandfather in 1870 and it says he's 50, that means he was born in 1820 and you're back to 1820 already. For an American that's pretty damned good, you know?

I don't know much about my family history except that my father had straight black hair and his ancestors probably came from India.

Maybe if I go far enough back into my ancestry, I have African roots or something. I've got no idea.

You can say I had a severe case of 'Roots' envy. I wanted to be like Alex Haley, and I wanted to be able to... do my family tree back to the slave ship and then reverse the Middle Passage, as I like to put it, and find the tribe or ethnic group that I was from in Africa.

All of us in the Ball family in South Carolina, from the time we're children, hear stories about our ancestors, the slave owners.

Africans in the United States must remember that the slave ships brought no West Indians, no Caribbeans, no Jamaicans or Trinidadians or Barbadians to this hemisphere. The slave ships brought only African people and most of us took the semblance of nationality from the places where slave ships dropped us off.

I think all in all, one thing a lot of plays seem to be saying is that we need to, as black Americans, to make a connection with our past in order to determine the kind of future we're going to have. In other words, we simply need to know who we are in relation to our historical presence in America.

My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South.

We must canonize our own saints, create our own martyrs … black men and women who have made their distinct contributions to our racial history.

There is a strong propensity in the human mind to trace up our ancestry as to high and as remote a source as possible; and if our pride and our ambition cannot be gratified by a real statement of facts, fable is substituted for truth, and the imagination is taxed to supply the deficiency.

People will not look forward to posterity who are not anxious to look backward to their ancestry

I'd love to meet my ancestors. I'd love to be able to speak to them.