The real estate agent had to go door-to-door in the apartment building we wanted to rent asking if it was OK for this interracial family - my mom is white and I was a 1-year-old half-African kid - to live in the apartment building.
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.
My family and our neighbors and friends thought of Africa and its Africans as extensions of the stereotyped characters that we saw in movies and on television in films such as 'Tarzan' and in programs such as 'Ramar of the Jungle' and 'Sheena Queen of the Jungle.'
The bottom line is that Wanda Sykes has the longest continuously documented family tree of any African-American we have ever researched.
I think it's a good thing for a president or political leaders to want to put their values or their faith into action. Desmond Tutu did that in South Africa. Martin Luther King Jr. did that here. This is a good thing.
I had very supportive parents that made the way for me even at a time when there were very few women - no women really maybe two or three women - and very few fewer than that African-American women heading in this direction so there were very few people to look up to. You just had to have faith.
My parents shared not only an improbable love they shared an abiding faith in the possibilities of this nation. They would give me an African name Barack or blessed believing that in a tolerant America your name is no barrier to success.
I knew that there were several among African-American leaders who had been put out by me because of my failure or reluctance to endorse Sen. Kerry.
African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 32 percent of patients treated for kidney failure giving them a kidney failure rate that is 4.2 times greater than that of white Americans.
They talk about the failure of socialism but where is the success of capitalism in Africa Asia and Latin America?