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So when you do your family tree and Margaret Cho does hers, and... Wanda Sykes and John Legend... we're adding to the database that scholars can then draw from to generalize about the complexity of the American experience. And that's the contribution that family trees make to broader scholarship.

I don't think there's enough breadth to the stories told about African-Americans.

If you read the memoirs of slave-owning families, you'd be hard pressed to find evidence of black people in the lives of the whites, even though for most of the time on the plantations black people outnumbered whites by a ratio of seven to one.

There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family.

You know, growing up, I lived in a neighborhood in Long Island where there was basically one black family. And I remember hearing all the parents and the kids in the neighborhood say racist things about this family.

The problem with relegating black history to one really short month, the shortest month, is not only are we telling the same stories over and over again - which are amazing, George Washington Carver is incredible, there's nobody like Frederick Douglass - but there are so many.

As an African-American actor, a lot of our stories haven't been told.

There are just so many stories that are buried on family trees.

'First Family' on the CW is about the president and his family living in the White House.

We examine and highlight the history of the African descendants in America, and know that each and every one of us has come this far because of our faith in this country.