"I would hope by now we would have gotten past the idea that because somebody says 'ask' instead of 'ax,' they are somehow not Black enough. A lot of my friends, people who are in the public eye, have faced this same thing over and over. It's like too many of our people are being led around and led to think what racists would have them believe."

"I've always said that if you lined up Ted Koppel, Barbara Walters, and Bryant Gumbel together, and all three asked the same question of the president, and followed it up with the same response, Ted Koppel would be viewed as confident, Barbara Walters would be viewed as bitchy, and Bryant Gumbel would be viewed as arrogant.

"Do I operate with a certain degree of confidence? Yes I do. I think my job asks me to. Am I rude to people? No I'm not. Do I respect them? Yes I do. But I do think, to some people, the minute a black man turns to a white official and says, 'Hey, wait a minute, two plus two is not three--two plus two is four. And you know it!' then that's arrogant! That's how they define arrogant."

"Let's face it, I think there are some people who are uncomfortable with a Black man who is their emotional, intellectual, economic equal, if not their superior.

Among Bryant's proudest achievements during his tenure with the Today show was his six year effort to sell NBC on a personal dream; to broadcast Today for an entire week from the continent of Africa. For five days the show came from different locations in the land that is the home of one-fifth of the world's population.

"The idea of doing the program from Africa is not a simple matter of just parking your stuff there and doing it." Bryant drew up several proposals and figured the cost of the production. Each time NBC said, no. He reworked the proposal, three and four times a year. Much of his time was spent going to the African embassies to get their cooperation.

"I had to do a lot of elbow rubbing with our State Department, with the African diplomats, and then deal with their lobbyists in order to gain their support. That consumed an awful lot of my time, too. We then had to draw up some kind of a plan that we could live with editorially, and that NBC could live with economically."

"The trip meant a lot to me, it really did," Bryant says. "I took my whole family over. I thought it was important for Americans to see Africa as something other than a starving continent, something other than animals wandering around. I wanted Americans to discard this idea that every African lives in a thatched hut with a lion outside his front door and a jungle in the back. Life in Africa isn't like that."