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Q. Everybody agrees that black kids today need healthy role models. Who are your nominees?
A. Among the people I like to think of as useful role models are author- educator W.E.B. Dubois, civil rights activist Mary Church Terrell, Nigerian playwright Wole Soyinka, South African leader Nelson Mandela, novelist Toni Morrison. And poet Phillis Wheatley: she was a genius. She learned English when she was about seven, and by the age of 15 she was publishing poems as sophisticated as any American who was publishing in the 18th century. We need to make that common knowledge, as common as the fact that Michael Jordan can do the triple quadruple backward dunk. And it's not.