African American Lit Quotes

Love can give you the most exhilarating wonderful highs at times ...
... Then there will be dives that will take all you have just to hold on ...
Quote on the Title Page of Love TORN Asunder ~ Elizabeth Funderbirk

Do you really think the rape of a continent dissolves in cigarette smoke? ~ Lorraine Hansberry

I have Native American blood. I have African blood. I have European blood. ~ Tamara Tunie

In L.A., I was a talent manager for many years. I represented many African-American actors. After a while, I became disheartened over the shortage of roles for African Americans. ~ Lee Daniels

Most people surrendered fairy tale hopes in exchange for cookie cutter lives ~ Roy L. Pickering Jr.

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

They made you an Amendment and convinced you it meant 'American. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

Since we were renamed, and now it feels like 80 percent of the African-American population has the name Washington or Jefferson or some president or slave owner's name. And, I almost wonder is this, like, is this part of a way of taking back the principle of naming your - I might be going too far into this - but naming your kids something of your choice? ~ Jordan Peele

After decades of talented race leaders, many of whom fell upon honourable swords, what we are left with now is educated liberals with dusky skin, warped notions, and limited vision ~ A. H. Septimius

Before Lyndon Johnson intervened to make sure blacks would become dependent on the government for just about everything they needed to live, black participation in the labor market was equal to or greater than that of whites. Today the "official" African-American unemployment rate - which doesn't take into account the enormous number of blacks who aren't even trying to find jobs - is around 14 percent. In fact, when you count those who don't even try to find a job, it's nearly 50 percent. When the numbers are added up, under this administration more than 60 percent of young black people are no longer even part of the labor force. It's the lowest ever recorded in our history. ~ Michael Savage

From politics and business to music and food to culture, African-Americans have helped to shape our state's colourful past and its future. ~ Mary Landrieu

Everybody knows - but no one wants to say - that the Democratic Party has become the party of special interest bigots and racial dividers. It runs the one-party state that controls public services in every major inner city, including the corrupt and failing school systems in which half the students - mainly African American and Hispanic - are denied a shot at the American dream. ~ David Horowitz

When I was growing up, so many of the important changes for African-Americans were being made in the United States Supreme Court and were being made by lawyers. I followed the court very intensely and wanted to do that for my life. ~ Leah Ward Sears

All these young children being sent to prison forever, all this grief and violence. Those judges throwing people away like they're not even human, people shooting each other, hurting each other like they don't care. I don't know, it's a lot of pain. I decided that I was supposed to be here [at the court] to catch some of the stones people cast at each other.'
I chuckled when she said it. During the McMillian hearings, a local minister had held a regional church meeting about the case and had asked me to come speak. There were a few people in the African American community whose support of Walter was muted, not because they thought he was guilty but because he had had an extramarital affair and wasn't active in the church. At the church meeting, I spoke mostly about Walter's case, but I also reminded people that when the woman accused of adultery was brought to Jesus, he told the accusers who wanted to stone her to death, 'Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.' The woman's accusers retreated, and Jesus forgave her and urged her to sin no more. But today, our self-righteousness, our fear, and our anger have caused even the Christians to hurl stones at the people who fall down, even when we know we should forgive or show compassion. I told the congregation that we can't simply watch that happen. I told them we have to be stonecatchers.
When I chuckled at the older woman's invocation of the parable, she laughed, too. 'I heard you in that courtroom today. I've ~ Bryan Stevenson

At the time i didn't realize why there was so much Klan activity, but later I learned that it was because African-American soldiers werre returning from World War Iasn acting as if they deserved equal rights because they had served their country. ~ Rosa Parks

Assessing Miller's rebuttal and the 1895 convention, W.E.B. Du Bois made a sobering observation. Miller had, on some fundamental level, misunderstood the aims of the white men who sought to destroy Reconstruction. From Du Bois's perspective, the 1895 constitutional convention was not an exercise in moral reform, or an effort to purge the state of corruption. These were simply bywords embraced to cover for the restoration of a despotic white supremacy. The problem was not that South Carolina's Reconstruction-era government had been consumed by unprecedented graft. Indeed, it was the exact opposite. The very success Miller highlighted, the actual record of 'Negro government' in South Carolina, undermined white supremacy. To redeem white supremacy, that record was twisted, mocked, and caricatured into something that better resembled the prejudices of white South Carolina. 'If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government,' wrote Du Bois, 'it was good Negro government. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

Life was a swirl of mysteries, each one waiting to be plucked up and explored, but not necessarily solved. As the weight of responsibility bore down on a person, it could feel like a long list of chores leading up to the final one - figuring out how to die with dignity. But Quincy's interpretation of his surroundings seemed a truer representation of life's meaning, or rather, the lack of meaning other than to dazzle and delight and befuddle from cradle to grave. ~ Roy L. Pickering Jr.

What the Nazis did to the Jews in Europe, plantation owners and law enforcement [officers] were doing to the African-Americans. ~ Morris Dees

African-Americans are always forced to learn the other culture, but the other culture is not forced to learn ours. I went to acting school at Juilliard, and we learned Shakespeare and Shaw, but we never did the work of a single African-American playwright, not August Wilson or Ntozake Shange or Imir Baraka. ~ Tracie Thoms

The first job I had with the Smithsonian was as a field researcher among African American communities in Southwest Louisiana and Arkansas for the festival. ~ Bernice Johnson Reagon

It's unfortunate that [Louis] Brandeis was not able to translate or abstract his devotion to cultural pluralism and racial equality as he put it for Jews to enslave people and their descendants and to African Americans. ~ Jeffrey Rosen

Over the past few decades we have developed euphemisms to help us forget how we, as a nation, have segregated African American citizens. We have become embarrassed about saying "ghetto", a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit. We don't hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as "the inner city", yet everyone knows what we mean. When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as "inner city families". Before we became ashamed to admit that the country had circumscribed African Americans in ghettos, analysts of race relations, both African American and white, consistently and accurately used "ghetto" to describe low-income African American neighborhoods created by public policy, with a shortage of opportunity, and with barriers to exit. ~ Richard Rothstein

African American children can't be educationally disadvantaged for 12 years and then experience a miracle cure when it comes time for admission into college. ~ Chaka Fattah

The world judges you by your color, the universe judges you by your deeds. ~ Matshona Dhliwayo

The Latin American has no tribe to fall back on, as the African does, no reliable judiciary to defend his rights as the European does, no social ideal or sacred constitution as the North American does, no pervasive mythology to soften life as it does in Asia, and no even an ideology to subscribe to, as does the Russian or Chinese. Without wealth, what is there left to him but his manhood, to be flaunted and defended at every occasion? ~ Ted Simon

With respect to Barack Obama, let's face it; Barack Obama is an iconic figure in the African-American community. We respect that. We understand that. African-Americans are going to vote for the first black president, especially when he happens to share the liberal politics on economic issues that many in that community hold. ~ Artur Davis

Yet, if the American Negro has arrived at his identity by virtue of the absoluteness of his estrangement from his past, American white men still nourish the illusion that there is some means of recovering the European innocence, of returning to a state in which black men do not exist. This is one of the greatest errors Americans can make. The identity they fought so hard to protect has, by virtue of that battle, undergone a change: Americans are as unlike any other white people in the world as it is possible to be. I do not think, for example, that it is too much to suggest that the American vision of the world-which allows so little reality, generally speaking, for any of the darker forces in human life, which tends until today to paint moral issues in glaring black and white owes a great deal to the battle waged by Americans to maintain between themselves and black men a human separation which could not be bridged. It is only now beginning to be borne in on us, very faintly, it must be admitted, very slowly, and very much against our will--that this vision of the world is dangerously inaccurate, and perfectly useless. For it protects our moral high-mindedness at the terrible expense of weakening our grasp of reality. People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a monster. ~ James Baldwin

I have a lot of African-American friends. ~ Larry Pressler

We've gone through the names - Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that's an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black? ~ Spike Lee

When I became a director, I wanted to convince a very reluctant Sidney into allowing me to go on the journey of his life. Sidney had gone ahead of every other African American actor. ~ Lee Grant

We are extremely proud to represent all of Radio One's stations within the Katz Radio Group. For the past five years we have worked diligently alongside Radio One to build their business in the markets we have historically represented including Houston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia , Raleigh and Columbus. At a time of significant growth in the African American consumer market the addition of the remaining Radio One stations expands our ability to deliver strategic marketing solutions to our agency and advertiser customers. ~ Steve Shaw

Jimmer Fredette is the best scorer in the world!! ~ Kevin Durant