When we are first generations and we come into money like that, we feel obligated to bring everybody with us. I think that’s real specific to our culture, and it’s almost expected.
African Americans Quotes
I think that Elvis was more acceptable being white back in that period. I believe that if Elvis had been Black, he wouldn’t have been as big as he was. If I was white, do you know how huge I’d be? If I was white, I’d be able to sit on top of the White […]
A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T. Washington to visit — to dine at the White House — was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of […]
Quality film-making is the key. You don’t wanna do films with black casts and directors just for the sake of doing it. Critical acclaim and commercial success is the goal. Also the way we work together as artists; giving to one another and sharing in the work. That’s what a renaissance is: artists who wanna […]
I didn’t become an actor to make a point. I became an actor to create, and I am an actor before I’m black.
Kwanzaa is a cultural holiday not a religious one. And it builds on African commonality, not on the religious, political and other choices we make which often separate us and cause us to focus on difference rather than similarity. In the final analysis, it all depends on personal choice; people choose holidays to celebrate, religions […]
Of my ancestry I know almost nothing. In the slave quarters, and even later, I heard whispered conversations among the coloured people of the tortures which the slaves, including, no doubt, my ancestors on my mother’s side, suffered in the middle passage of the slave ship while being conveyed from Africa to America.
I’m the heir of a proud legacy of Black soldiers who went before me, the buffalo soldiers of the post-Civil War period, the Tuskegee Airmen. And what was put into me was that we served and sacrificed at a time when our nation was not prepared to serve us or sacrifice for us. But we […]
The word “wait” has been a tranquilizing Thalidomide, giving birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration. Only by following the cause of tender-heartedness can man matriculate into the university of eternal life. Segregation is the adultery of an illicit intercourse between injustice and immorality, and it cannot be cured by the Vaseline of gradualism.
The negro, no matter how much he is educated, must remain, as a race, in a condition of subservience; that he must remain the inferior of the stronger and more intelligent white man so long as he retains racial differentiation. Therefore, the effort to educate him has awakened in his mind ambitions and aspirations which, […]
