No great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. We younger Negro artists now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren’t, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too… If colored people are pleased we are […]
African Americans Quotes
I say good night to you by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher, who said, “We ain’t what we ought to be and we ain’t what we’re going to be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.”
Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to get insulted.
It was the police who tracked us as we fled the plantation. It was the police who took Rosa Parks off the bus in Montgomery, Ala. It was Police Chief “Bull” Connor who set dogs and fires hoses on black men, women and children in Birmingham, Alabama… I am well aware of the black criminal, […]
Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.
Everybody has asked the question… “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they […]
Don’t let them break your spirit, we have picked too much cotton for that.
It is the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually time is neutral. It can be used either destructively or constructively. I am coming to feel that the people of ill will have not used time much more effectively than the people […]
This is the modern paradox of Sin before which the Puritan stands open-mouthed and mute. A group, a nation, or a race commits murder and rape, steals and destroys, yet no individual is guilty, no one is to blame, no one can be punished. The black world squirms beneath the feet of the white in […]
I have supposed the black man, in his present state, might not be in body and mind equal to the white man; but it would be hazardous to affirm that, equally cultivated for a few generations, he would not become so.
