You can read this quote by Thelonious Monk, from an interview with Down Beat in 1971, in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. Read how the quote is referenced here.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and founding director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. He is also the editor-in-chief of The Root. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.