It’s been a struggle for me because I had a chance to be white and refused.
Black Quotes
A black plum is as sweet as a white.
Thousands of black children are drifting downstream toward a deadly waterfall. And we black adults are standing along the bank reassuring ourselves: “Well, at least it’s not our fault.” I have no interest in disputing the assertion. It really isn’t our fault – or at any rate not only our fault. My question is much […]
You see? I just wrote ‘black American.’ I couldn’t even bring myself to write “African American.” It’s a phrase that, for me, doesn’t roll naturally off the tongue: “African American.” Is that what we really are? Is there anything really “African” left in the descendants of those original slaves who made that tortuous journey across […]
Then all at once, with the mercurial changeability of the magnificently smashed, he forgot he was angry at her. “You know,” he said conversationally, “it’s a long time indeed I been wonderin’ why your own folk ever gave up so gorgeous a name as The Colored – I don’t understand it, be dipped if I […]
Finally the captain said, “Come here, nigger.” I walked directly to him. “What can I do for you?” I asked. “Nigger,” he said menacingly, “you’re supposed to be scared when you come in here!” – “I am fortified by truth, justice and Christ,” I said. “There is no need for me to fear.” He was […]
The haughty American nation – makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the Negro by the fact he is a bootblack.
Black families have always talked openly about white ancestors and relatives. In hotbeds of race-mixing like New Orleans or Charleston, S.C., black and white branches of a family sometimes lived so close at hand that they ran into one another on the street, and black children were warned that their pale relatives could react violently […]
There’s not enough troops in the Army… to force the Southern people to… admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.
You don’t think I care if a Negro comes into a drugstore to have a coke, do you?
