African American Spirituality Quotes

When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman, and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing--a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of the path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees.

After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, 'Let the children come!' and they ran from the trees toward her.

Let your mothers hear you laugh,' she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling.

Then 'Let the grown men come,' she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees.

Let your wives and your children see you dance,' she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet.

Finally she called the women to her. 'Cry,' she told them. 'For the living and the dead. Just cry.' And without covering their eyes the women let loose.

It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and ~ Toni Morrison

This power, this black power, originates in a view of the American galaxy taken from a dark and essential planet. Black power is the dungeon-side view of Monticello - which is to say, the view taken in struggle. And black power births a kind of understanding that illuminates all the galaxies in their truest colors. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

You can't look forward and backward ... ~ Coleman Young

It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing. ~ Duke Ellington

In African American culture, class bias is the handmaiden of intraracial prejudice that privileges the near-white or light-complexioned person over the darker-hued. ~ Rita B. Dandridge

In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February. ~ Natasha Trethewey

As the years passed, new myths arose to explain the mysterious objects the strangers brought from the land of the dead. A nineteenth-century missionary recorded, for example, an African explanation of what happened when captains descended into the holds of their ships to fetch trading goods like cloth. The Africans believed that these goods came not from the ship itself but from a hole that led into the ocean. Sea sprites weave this cloth in an "oceanic factory, and, whenever we need cloth, the captain ... goes to this hole and rings a bell." The sea sprites hand him up their cloth, and the captain "then throws in, as payment, a few dead bodies of black people he has bought from those bad native traders who have bewitched their people and sold them to the white men." The myth was not so far from reality. For what was slavery in the American South, after all, but a system for transforming the labor of black bodies, via cotton plantations, into cloth? ~ Adam Hochschild

It occurred to them for the first time in their lives that what's divine can come in dark skin. ~ Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life Of Bees

Popular culture - above all rock 'n' roll, with its African-American R & B roots - did far more to radicalize us than did any feminist leader. ~ Camille Paglia

You must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. The enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. They were people turned to fuel for the American machine. Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance - no matter how improved - as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. Our triumphs can never compensate for this. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

We can't all work in the inner city. And, I don't even think that it is incumbent upon an African-American intellectual to be concerned in their work with problems of race and class. It's just one of the things, that we here at the DuBois Institute, are concerned about. ~ Henry Louis Gates

Was love ever easy for anyone? If less complicated, would this make it less appreciated? Perhaps love was difficult for good reason. Perhaps everything on God's green earth was the result of a flawless plan, even that which seemed most muddled. ~ Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Unfortunately, oppression does not automatically produce only meaningful struggle. It has the ability to call into being a wide range of responses between partial acceptance and violent rebellion. In between you can have, for instance, a vague, unfocused dissatisfaction; or, worst of all, savage infighting among the oppressed, a fierce love-hate entanglement with one another like crabs inside the fisherman's bucket, which ensures that no crab gets away. This is a serious issue for African-American deliberation.
To answer oppression with appropriate resistance requires knowledge of two kinds: in the first place, self-knowledge by the victim, which means awareness that oppression exists, an awareness that the victim has fallen from a great height of glory or promise into the present depths; secondly, the victim must know who the enemy is. He must know his oppressor's real name, not an alias, a pseudonym, or a nom de plume! ~ Chinua Achebe

I've made it my mission to make movies starring African American actors and about the African American experience and put them in the mainstream. They're very universal stories I've told - every movie I've done. ~ Malcolm D. Lee

The most dangerous place for an African-American in this country is in the womb. ~ Rick Santorum

I feel that the kinks, curls, or tight coils in Afro hair is beautiful and unique. No other race on this planet has hair like ours - that makes me proud. ~ Monica Millner

If you don't have a bed, or a dresser or a wall, or a book or a toy you are oppressed. An African American in a white world. A Jew in a Christian world. A gypsy. A Native American. A Chinese American. Let's say, you were born deprived. ~ Gerald Stern

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

Like a lot of Black women, I have always had to invent the power my freedom requires ... ~ June Jordan

Nothing felt better to him than the act of waiting for her. As long as he believed it wasn't in vain, he was able to justify his presence. ~ Roy L. Pickering Jr.

Perhaps it now occurs to him that in this need to establish himself in his relation to his past [the African American] is most American, that this depthless alienation from oneself and one's people is, in sum, the American experience. ~ James Baldwin

Everything African-Americans - every freedom they have obtained - came from Republicans, not Democrats. All the way back to the Emancipation Proclamation, to the Civil Rights movement. Civil Rights legislation was passed by a Republican Congress. ~ Rafael Cruz

I think others may look at the uniqueness of my candidacy, the fact that I'm an African-American, conservative tea party Republican, and somehow race injects itself into the conversation. ~ Niger Innis

I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves or figments of their imagination, indeed, everything and anything except me. ~ Ralph Ellison

I have always respected everyone's ... ~ Hazel Scott

None of us is responsible for the ... ~ Marian Anderson

Religion is for people who're afraid of going to hell. Spirituality is for those who've already been there. ~ Vine Deloria Jr.

Well, what I will tell you is the support from the world - it's not just an African-American citizen. There are people of all different walks of life who are rallying behind the concerns with the that Sandy was treated because what that says to me is that this is an American issue. ~ Sharon Cooper

In the African American community, we are very 'hush, hush' about things in our life. ~ Kym Whitley

Are things getting better with each generation? Yes. It's quite interesting to be living in these times, for me to witness an African-American being elected president. It's quite extraordinary. ~ Lenny Kravitz

I always believed there would be an African-American president. It was something I'd dreamed about, thought about, but certainly did not believe would happen in my lifetime. ~ Edward Brooke

What I consider to be the barometer for what is a rock artist and what is not, is somebody who has a certain element of blues, even a hint of soul or blues music, derivative of African-American blues, folk, spiritual, or gospel. ~ Ian Astbury

Remember that everyone's life is measured by the power that individual has to make the world better-this is all life is. ~ Booker T. Washington

Slavery is a memory of something we cannot remember, and yet we cannot forget. ~ Bill T. Jones

You carry the weight of the preternatural world on those big shoulders of yours. But your heart is even bigger, and the burden you harbor there heavier. ~ N.D. Jones

Roy is my favorite security guy. He's a huge African-American gentleman who always has a beautiful smile on his face. He's the King of the Main Desk, and I'm always glad to arrive at work and bask in his magnificent good cheer. ~ Audrey Niffenegger

I will go to the NAACP convention, and explain to the African-American community why they should demand paychecks instead of food stamps. ~ Newt Gingrich

I had not expected the gentle, tentative surge of gratitude I began to feel...for St. Paul's School, the spring, and the early morning. I needed the morning light and the warbling birds. I needed to find a way to live in this place for a moment and get the good of it. I had tried to hold myself apart, and the aloneness proved more terrible than what I had tried to escape. ~ Lorene Cary

In other words, Texans lynched one person a month for thirty years, and almost 80 percent of the time the man or woman hanging on the end of a rope or smoldering in the remains of a fire was African American. ~ E.R. Bills

Older people of color in the South would occasionally come up to me after speeches to complain about how antagonized they feel when they hear news commentators talking about how we were dealing with domestic terrorism for the first time in the United States after the 9/11 attacks. An older African American man once said to me, "You make them stop saying that! We grew up with terrorism all the time. The police, the Klan, anybody who was white could terrorize you. We had to worry about bombings and lynchings, racial violence of all kinds. ~ Bryan Stevenson

Black bodies have become ornamental, haven't they? ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

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

In the American way of life pleasure involves comfort, convenience, and sexual stimulation. Pleasure, so defined, has little to do with the past and views the future as no more than a repetition of a hedonistically driven present. This market morality stigmatizes others as objects for personal pleasure or bodily stimulation. The reduction of individuals to objects of pleasure is especially evident in the culture industries
television, radio, video, music. Like all Americans, African Americans are influenced greatly by the images of comfort. These images contribute to the predominance of the market-inspired way of life over all others and thereby edge out nonmarket values
love, care, service to others
handed down by preceding generations. The predominance of this way of life among those living in poverty-ridden conditions, with a limited capacity to ward of self-contempt and self-hatred, results in the possible triumph of the nihilistic threat in black America. ~ Cornel West

[According to Twitter] 24 percent of American Twitter users are African-American. That's about twice as high as African-Americans are represented in the population. ~ Ethan Zuckerman

It's easy to do anything in victory. It's in defeat that a man reveals himself. ~ Floyd Patterson

Though many strive to hide their human libidinousness from themselves and each other, being a force of nature, it breaks through. Lots of uptight, proper Americans were scandalized by the way Elvis moved his hips when he sang "rock and roll." But how many realized what the phrase rock and roll meant? Cultural historian Michael Ventura, investigating the roots of African-American music, found that rock 'n' roll was a term that originated in the juke joints of the South. Long in use by the time Elvis appeared, Ventura explains the phrase "hadn't meant the name of a music, it meant 'to fuck.' 'Rock,' by itself, has pretty much meant that, in those circles, since the twenties at least." By the mid-1950s, when the phrase was becoming widely used in mainstream culture, Ventura says the disc jockeys "either didn't know what they were saying or were too sly to admit what they knew. ~ Christopher Ryan

In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view. ~ John Henrik Clarke

Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it. ~ Rosa Parks

Regardless of what you play, the biggest thing is keeping the feel going. ~ Wes Montgomery

My intention is not to repudiate an African American identity but perhaps to resist how labels take hold, or to make it as slow a process as possible. That's more my sense of it. ~ Mark McMorris