Malachi Kirby Quotes

I was 7 years old when 'Roots' was first broadcast, and my parents gathered all us kids around the TV to learn about how we got here. But it wasn't until I sat down and immersed myself in the research that I got the barest inkling of what it meant to be a slave.

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.

Inspired by Alex Haley's 'Roots,' at the age of 11 I began a handwritten Middle Passage story called 'Lawdy, Lawdy, Make Us Free.' I was raised by civil rights activists with a very strong sense of racial history and consciousness.

It's very strange that most people don't care if their knowledge of their family history only goes back three generations.

The gateway to freedom...was somewhere close to New Orleans where most Africans were sorted through and sold. I had driven through New Orleans on tour and I'd been told my great grandfather had lived way back up in the woods among the evergreens in a log cabin. I revived the era with a song about a coloured boy named Johnny B. Goode. My first thought was to make his life follow as my own had come along, but I thought it would seem biased to white fans to say 'coloured boy' and changed it to 'country boy'.

Alex Hailey, who traced his roots all the way to the back of the bus. Never got a dinner!

You want to try to find your heritage.

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

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

I stand by 'Roots' as symbol of the fate of my people.

It is important to know where you come from.

I feel like our history and our roots make us who we are.

My mother's proud of where she's from, and her history, and her past, and same with my dad. I have roots in Africa. Like, I am from Africa as well as from Germany, and I am very proud of that.

People like to trace their ancestry.

My family in St. Louis brings me to my roots.

I think that our comfort is in our history.

I don't think I've ever spoken to anyone who's told me that the story of 'Roots' isn't important.

One of the biggest things that I took from playing Kunta Kinte was where his strength came from in knowing where he was from.

Do not forget from whence you've come.

Schools don't teach American history that well, especially a lot of black American history.

It's where you come from that's the strange, exotic, quirky, mad place.

I was researching my family tree, and I was deeply hoping I was going to turn out to be Eastern European, but I'm not.

Black history is American history. You cannot tell one story without telling the other.

My children have to know where they come from and the way of life in Africa.

Before I came out, there was no such thing as a black conciousness movement. Kids on the street didn't know who Malcom X or Martin Luther King was until rap let them know.