Negro Quotes

Growing up in Harlem, I had the chance to practice with a Negro League team. At fifteen, I was over six feet tall and a fair athlete, but my skills didn't come close to some of the players I saw. ~ Walter Dean Myers

I always wanted to eat with a Negro," Grandma said.
Yeah, well I always wanted to eat with a boney-assed old white woman," Lula said. "So I guess this works out good. ~ Janet Evanovich

I don't think the negro problem can be discussed coherently without bearing in mind its context; its context being the history, traditions, customs, the moral assumptions and preoccupations of the country; in short, the general social fabric. Appearances to the contrary, no one in America escapes its effects and everyone in America bears some responsibility for it. I believe this the more firmly because it is the overwhelming tendency to speak of this problem as if it were a thing apart ~ James Baldwin

The negro king desired to be portrayed as white. But do not laugh at the poor African; for every man is but another negro king, and would like to appear in a color different from that with which Fate has bedaubed him. ~ Heinrich Heine

I don't know who my parents were. I know nothing about my inheritance. I could be Jewish; I could be part Negro; I could be Irish; I could be Russian. I am spiritually a mix anyway, but I did have a solid childhood fortunately, because of some wonderful women who brought me up. I never had a father or a man in the house, and that was a loss, but you live with that loss. ~ James A. Michener

All over Harlem, Negro boys and girls are growing into stunted maturity, trying desperately to find a place to stand; and the wonder is not that so many are ruined but that so many survive. ~ James A. Baldwin

I don't think of myself as a Negro. I'm a Southerner. I just like the Southern way of life. ~ Julian Bond

and it was this that made her frown, that the only time a Negro was allowed to be treated with grandeur was when he or she wasn't even alive to appreciate it. ~ Ray Celestin

Whether in private debate or in public, any attempt I made to explain how the Black Muslim movement came about, and how it has achieved such force, was met with a blankness that revealed the little connection that the liberals' attitudes have with their perceptions or their lives, or even their knowledge - revealed, in fact, that they could deal with the Negro as a symbol or a victim but had no sense of him as a man. ~ James Baldwin

The child came to a stop beside her mother and stared up at her face as if she had never seen it before. It was the face of the new misery she felt, but on her mother it looked old and it looked as if it might have belonged to anybody, a Negro or a European or to Powell himself. The child turned her head quickly, and past the Negroe's ambling figures she could see the column of smoke rising and widening unchecked inside the granite line of trees. She stood taut, listening, and could just catch in the distance a few wild high shrieks of joy as if the prophets were dancing in the fiery furnace, in the circle the angel had cleared for them. ~ Flannery O'Connor

To the great majority of white Americans, the Negro problem has distinctly negative connotations. It suggests something difficult to settle and equally difficult to leave alone. It is embarrassing. It makes for moral uneasiness. ~ Gunnar Myrdal

The Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its touching minor cadences, which, despite caricature and defilement, still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on American soil. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

There is a certain type of white Southerner who respects certain Negro individuals. ~ Ethel Waters

I'm grateful to God that, through the Negro church, the dimension of nonviolence entered our struggle. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Negro will have to build his own industry, art, sciences, literature, and culture before the world will stop to consider him. ~ Marcus Garvey

She threatened a Negro man who worked for her father that if he didn't take (have sex with) her she would swear he tried rape.
He had no choice, except that he quit working for them. And from then until she finished high school,
she managed it several times with other Negroes ~ Malcolm X

Right. But do you think I could face my children otherwise? You know what's going to happen as well as I do, Jack, and I hope and pray I can get Jem and Scout through it without bitterness, and most of all, without catching Maycomb's usual disease. Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand... I just hope that Jem and Scout come to me for their answers instead of listening to the town. I hope they trust me enough... Jean Louise?" My scalp jumped. I stuck my head around the corner. "Sir?" "Go to bed. ~ Harper Lee

It was as a result of his courage that two white men were on trial for killing a Negro, a trial in which, whatever the result, there is a kind of majesty. And we owe that sight to Mose Wright, who was condemned to bow all his life, and had enough left to raise his head and look the enemy in those terrible eyes when he was sixty-four. ~ Robert A. Caro

Whiteness is not a culture. There is Irish culture and Italian culture and American culture - the latter, as Albert Murray pointed out, a mixture of the Yankee, the Indian, and the Negro (with a pinch of ethnic salt); there is youth culture and drug culture and queer culture; but there is no such thing as white culture. Whiteness has nothing to do with culture and everything to do with social position. It is nothing but a reflection of privilege, and exists for no reason other than to defend it. Without the privileges attached to it, the white race would not exist, and the white skin would have no more social significance than big feet. ~ Noel Ignatiev

Fortunate, most fortunate occurrence! - fortunate for the millions of his manacled brethren, yet panting for deliverance from their awful thralldom! - fortunate for the cause of negro emancipation, and of universal liberty! - fortunate for the land of his birth, which he has already done so much to save and bless! - fortunate for a large circle of friends and acquaintances, whose sympathy and affection he has strongly secured by the many sufferings he has endured, by his virtuous traits of character, by his ever-abiding remembrance of those who are in bonds, as being bound with them! - fortunate for the multitudes, in various parts of our republic, whose minds he has enlightened on the subject of slavery, and who have been melted to tears by his pathos, or roused to virtuous indignation by his stirring eloquence against the enslavers of men! - fortunate for himself, as it at once brought him into the field of public usefulness, "gave the world assurance of a MAN," quickened the slumbering energies of his soul, and consecrated him to the great work of breaking the rod of the oppressor, and letting the oppressed go free! ~ William Lloyd Garrison

If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls. ~ Harriet Ann Jacobs

THE "educated Negroes" have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well as in their mixed schools Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton and to despise the African. Of the hundreds of Negro high schools recently examined by an expert in the United States Bureau of Education only eighteen offer a course taking up the history of the Negro, ~ Carter G. Woodson

In later years, I confess that I do not envy the white boy as I once did. I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed. Looked at from this standpoint, I almost reach the conclusion that often the Negro boy's birth and connection with an unpopular race is an advantage, so far as real life is concerned. With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his tasks even better than a white youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one misses whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of birth and race. ~ Booker T. Washington

I know that if the peace movement takes its message boldly to the Negro people a powerful force can be secured in pursuit of the greatest goal of all mankind. And the same is true of labor and the great democratic sections of our population. ~ Paul Robeson

Because I knew that racist Negro Archetypes, like Bebe's Kids, don't die. They multiply. ~ Paul Beatty

I use African-American, because I teach African Studies as well as African-American Studies, so it's easy, neat and convenient. But sometimes, when you're in a barber shop, somebody'll say, "Did you see what that Negro did?" A lot of people slip in and out of different terms effortlessly, and I don't think the thought police should be on patrol. ~ Henry Louis Gates

Negrophobes exist. It is not hatred of the Negro, however, that motivates them; they lack the courage for that, or they have lost it. Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behavior; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching. Each to his own side of the street. ~ Frantz Fanon

Black! Black! Black! I am proud of being a Negro. Nor have I ever tried to beg tolerance from anyone. Superiority is not proved by color, but by the brain, by education, by willpower, by moral courage. ~ Jose Celso Barbosa

James Thompson, a twenty-six-year-old cafeteria worker, eloquently articulated the Negro dilemma in a letter he wrote to the Pittsburgh Courier: "Being an American of dark complexion," wrote Thompson, "these questions flash through my mind: 'Should I sacrifice my life to live half American?' ... 'Will colored Americans suffer still the indignities that have been heaped upon them in the past?' These and other questions need answering; I want to know, and I believed every colored American, who is thinking, wants to know. ~ Margot Lee Shetterly

I contend that the cry of 'Black Power' is, at bottom, a reaction to the reluctance of white power to make the kind of changes necessary to make justice a reality for the Negro. I think that we've got to see that a riot is the language of the unheard. And, what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the economic plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years." - Martin Luther King, Jr., 60 Minutes Interview, 1966 ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

We can no longer oversimplify. We can no longer build lazy and false stereotypes: Americans are like this, Russians are like that, a Jew behaves in such a way, a Negro thinks in a different way. The lazy generalities - 'You know how women are ... Isn't that just like a man?' The world cannot be understood from a single point of view. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends. ~ Abraham Maslow

The battle was first waged over the right of the Negro to be classed as a human being with a soul; later, as to whether he had sufficient intellect to master even the rudiments of learning; and today it is being fought out over his social recognition. ~ James Weldon Johnson

Fear of black independence and self-determination took a Freudian form: rape hysteria. In one town after another, racial violence was sparked by rumors that a Negro had harmed a white woman. This happened in Washington; Omaha, Neb.; Kansas City, Kan.; Knoxville, Tenn.; Longview, Tex.; and Rosewood, Fla. ~ Anonymous

The whites come to applaud a Negro performer just like the colored do. When you've got the respect of white and colored, you can ease a lot of things. ~ Nat King Cole

The slaveholders of America had devised with almost scientific precision their systems for keeping the Negro defenseless, emotionally and physically. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The time will come when the Negro in the South will be accorded all the political rights which his ability, character, and material possessions entitle him to. ~ Booker T. Washington

At some time, every Negro in the armed services asks himself what he is getting for the supreme sacrifice he is called upon to make. - Pittsburgh Courier, November 9, 1944 ~ Steve Sheinkin

Of course Covarrubias wasn't a negro, but how he caught the darky spirit! ~ Langston Hughes

Many of the things which we deplore, the prevalence of tuberculosis, the mounting record of crime in certain sections of the country, are not due just to lack of education and to physical differences, but are due in great part to the basic fact of segregation which we have set up in this country and which warps and twists the lives not only of our Negro population, but sometimes of foreign born or even of religious groups. ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

But I must own that I also felt stirred by an unselfish desire to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form. ~ James Weldon Johnson

Let the lowest white man count for more than the highest negro. ~ Thomas Pearce Bailey

It is dangerous to be an American Negro male. America has never wanted its Negroes to be men, and does not, generally, treat them as men. It treats them as mascots, pets, or things. ~ James Baldwin

I am not going to stress the usual argument that the police habitually mistreat Negroes. Every Negro knows this. There is scarcely any black man, woman, or child in the land who at some point or other has not been mistreated by a policeman. (A young man in Watts said, "The riots will continue because I, as a Negro, am immediately considered to be a criminal by the police and, if I have a pretty woman with me, she is a tramp even if she is my wife or mother.") ~ Bayard Rustin

Denzel Washington is a big Hollywood movie star now. But he started out as an actor in the Negro Ensemble company. ~ Pearl Cleage

We in the Negro leagues felt like we were contributing something to baseball, too, when we were playing. We played with a round ball, and we played with a round bat. And we wore baseball uniforms, and we thought that we were making a contribution to baseball. We loved the game, and we liked to play it. ~ Buck Leonard

The Potomac had taken away Linda and the boys.
The Rio Negro had given him Daniela.
One river had swallowed his heart; another river, halfway around the world, had gifted it back. A different heart, beaten up, scarred, but a beating heart at least. ~ Dana Marton

The Negro who experiences bitter and agonizing circumstances as a result of some ungodly white person is tempted to look upon all white persons as evil, if he fails to look beyond his circumstances. But the minute he looks beyond his circumstances and sees the whole of the situation, he discovers that some of the most implacable and vehement advocates of racial equality are consecrated white persons. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

So Ham's wife that was preserved on the Ark was a Negro of the seed of Cain and there was a priestly purpose in it, that the Devil would have a representation as well as God. ~ Warren Jeffs

You do not preach and encourage hatred for the Negro and hope to restrict it to that field. It is an old, old story. It is one repeated over and over again in history. When the wolves of hate are loosed on one people, then no one is safe. ~ Ralph McGill

There is no justification for the common claim that Christianity was responsible for the abolition of slavery. The Negro slave trade - a far more infamous practice than slavery in the ancient world - was initiated, carried on and defended by Christian men in Christian countries. ~ Margaret E. Knight

Nonviolent action, the Negro saw, was the way to supplement, not replace, the progress of change. It was the way to divest himself of passivity without arraying himself in vindictive force. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the shadowy and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

My own convictions as to negro slavery are strong. It has its evils and abuses ... We recognize the negro as God and God's Book and God's Laws, in nature, tell us to recognize him - our inferior, fitted expressly for servitude ... You cannot transform the negro into anything one-tenth as useful or as good as what slavery enables them to be. ~ Jefferson Davis

I am a colored woman or a Negro woman. Either one is OK. People dislike those words now. Today these use this term African American. It wouldn't occur to me to use that. I prefer to think of myself as an American, that's all! ~ Annie Elizabeth Delany

Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called, below him appear the Negro and the Indian. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

Remember, we are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit a larger freedom that encompasses all mankind. ~ Ella Baker

We must never forget that the dance is the cradle of Negro music. ~ Alain LeRoy Locke

She said she'd chosen Santa Cruz because when se walked around the campus, she blended somehow, no one asking if she was part Negro, no one accusing her of passing for white. ~ Jacqueline Woodson

I grew silent and reserved as the nature of the world in which I lived became plain and undeniable; the bleakness of the future affected my will to study. Granny had already thrown out hints that it was time for me to be on my own. But what had I learned so far that would help me to make a living? Nothing. I could be a porter like my father before me, but what else? And the problem of living as a Negro was cold and hard. What was it that made the hate of whites for blacks so steady, seemingly so woven into the texture of things? What kind of life was possible under that hate? How had this ~ Richard Wright

Films make me into some cheap turn ... You bet they'll never let me play a part in a film where a Negro is on top. ~ Paul Robeson

I never cease to wonder at the amazing presumption of much of white society, assuming that they have the right to bargain with the Negro for his freedom. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Magical Negro rested his red cane on his shoulder and leisurely strolled into the forest to see if he could find him some hobbits, castles, dragons, princesses, and all that other shit. ~ Nnedi Okorafor

The white man who begins by cheating a Negro usually ends by cheating a white man. The white man who begins to break the law by lynching a Negro soon yields to the temptation to lynch a white man. ~ Booker T. Washington

My music is not for everyone. It's only for the stong-willed, the [street] soldiers music. It's not like party music- I mean, you could gig to it, but it's spiritual. My musi is spiritual. It's like Negro spiituals, except for the fact that I'm not saying 'We shall Overcome.' I'm saying that we are overcome. ~ Tupac Shakur

If the American Negro is to have a culture of his own he will have to leave America to get it. ~ Paul Robeson

Even though Mr. Dalton gave millions of dollars for Negro education, he would rent houses to Negroes only in this prescribed area, this corner of the city tumbling down from rot. In a sullen way Bigger was conscious of this. Yes; he would send the kidnap note. He would jar them out of their senses. When ~ Richard Wright

I think that when people like you , Mr. Von Vampton, say "The Negro Experience" you are saying that all Negroes experience the world the same way. In that way you can isolate the misfits who would propel them into penetrating the ceiling of this bind you and your assistants have established in this country. The ceiling above which no slave would be allowed to penetrate without stirring the kept bloodhounds. ~ Ishmael Reed

But if the Negro is so distinctly inferior, it is a strange thing to me that it takes such tremendous effort on the part of the white man to make him realize it, and to keep him in the same place into which inferior men naturally fall. ~ James Weldon Johnson

I've learned that my people are not the only ones oppressed ... I have sung my songs all over the world and everywhere found that some common bond makes the people of all lands take to Negro songs as their own. ~ Paul Robeson

Perhaps I should have been a Negro. I suspect I would have been a rather large and terrifying one, continually pressing my ample thigh against the withered thighs of old white ladies in public conveyances a great deal and eliciting more than one shriek of panic. Then, too, if I were a Negro, I would not be pressured by my mother to find a good job, for no good jobs would be available. My mother herself, a worn old Negress, would be too broken by years of underpaid labor as a domestic to go out bowling at night. She and I could live most pleasantly in some moldy shack in the slums in a state of ambitionless peace, realizing contentedly that we were unwanted, that striving was meaningless. ~ John Kennedy Toole

It is said that the Negro is ignorant. But why is he ignorant? It comes with ill grace from a man who has put out my eyes to makea parade of my blindness,
to reproach me for my poverty when he has wronged me of my money ... If he is poor, what has become of the money he has been earning for the last two hundred and fifty years? Years ago it was said cotton fights and cotton conquers for American slavery. The Negro helped build up that great cotton power in the South, and in the North his sigh was in the whir of its machinery, and his blood and tears upon the warp and woof of its manufactures. ~ Frances Harper

The Negro does not want love. He wants justice ... I believe it would be better for the Negro's soul to be seared with hate than dwarfed by self-abasement. ~ E. Franklin Frazier

Slavery is not the only question which comes up in this controversy. There is a far more important one to you, and that is, what shall be done with the free negro? ~ Stephen Douglas

What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. ~ Frederick Douglass

The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival. ~ Ida B. Wells

Among some of the organized methods used to control the world is the thing known and called PROPAGANDA. Propaganda has done more to defeat the good intentions of races and nations than even open warfare. Propaganda is a method or medium used by organized peoples to convert others against their will. We of the Negro race are suffering more than any other race in the world from propaganda ... propaganda to destroy our hopes, our ambitions and our confidence in self. ~ Marcus Garvey

Norris's politics fit well with the Klan because he had a holistic view of how race, religion, morality, and politics fit together. Commenting on an interracial marriage that took place at a church in New York, Norris said, "I can name to you a people south of the Mason-Dixon Line that if a Negro should take a white girl's hand in marriage that girl would be without a Negro husband before the sun arose the next morning." Furthermore, said Norris, he would gladly perform the funeral. [100] ~ Andrew Himes

Being a Negro in America means trying to smile when you want to cry. It means trying to hold on to physical life amid psychological death. It means the pain of watching your children grow up with clouds of inferiority in their mental skies. It means having their legs off, and then being condemned for being a cripple. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

If the Negro knows enough to pay taxes to support the government, he knows enough to vote; taxation and representation should go together. If he knows enough to shoulder a musket and fight for the flag, fight for the government, he knows enough to vote. ~ Frederick Douglass

They fear that without compulsion the masses will not work. But during our own lifetime, have we not heard the same fears expressed twice? Once, by the anti-abolitionists in America before the emancipation of the Negroes, and, for a second time, by the Russian nobility before the liberation of the serfs? 'Without the whip the Negro will not work,' said the anti- abolitionist. 'Free from their master's supervision the serfs will leave the fields uncultivated,' said the Russian serf-owners. It was the refrain of the French noblemen in 1789, the refrain of the Middle Ages, a refrain as old as the world, and we shall hear it every time there is a question of sweeping away an injustice. And each time actual facts give it the lie. The liberated peasant of 1792 ploughed with an eager energy, unknown to his ancestor so, the emancipated Negro works more than his fathers; and the Russian peasant, after having honoured the honeymoon of his emancipation by celebrating Fridays as well as Sundays, has taken up work with an eagerness proportionate to the completeness of his liberation. There, where the soil is his, he works desperately; that is the exact word for it. The anti-abolitionist refrain can be of value to slave-owners; as to the slaves them- selves, they know what it is worth, as they know its motive. ~ Pyotr Kropotkin

Like the Negro League players, I traveled through the segregated south as a young man. Because I was black, I was denied service at many restaurants and could only drink from water fountains marked 'Colored.' When I went to the movies, I would have to sit in the Colored balcony. ~ Walter Dean Myers

Thus one can see in the Negro church to-day, reproduced in microcosm, all the great world from which the Negro is cut off by color-prejudice and social condition. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

Through the years I have received my share of recognition for efforts in the fields of sports, the arts, the struggle for full citizenship for the Negro people, labor's rights and the fight for peace. ~ Paul Robeson

Of one slave Carter wrote, "dismembering will reclaim him.… I have cured many a Negro of running away by this means." This horrible practice, legalized in 1705, evidently became widespread, with much resultant butchery; it received further legal blessing in the tightening of the slave laws in 1723, when the Virginia Assembly absolved owners and surgeons of manslaughter if such "dismembering" resulted in the slave's death. The lawmakers assumed that no sane man would deliberately destroy his own very valuable property. It is hideous to imagine that doctors would participate in such medical atrocities, but they did. ~ Henry Wiencek

Compared to my talents, Whoopi Goldberg is like one of those fake plastic Buddhas you get at dollar stores. I mean really, I fail to see the humor in an overweight negro woman with dreadlocks, no eyebrows, and is named after a childish term for flatulence. ~ Zach Braff

People involved in a revolution don't become part of the system; they destroy the system ... The Negro revolution is no revolution because it condemns the system and then asks the system it has condemned to accept them ... ~ Malcolm X

I was born in a Negro town. ~ Zora Neale Hurston

I feel that non-violence is really the only way that we can follow because violence is just so self-defeating. A riot ends up creating many more problems for the negro community than it solved. We can through violence burn down a building, but you can't establish justice. You can murder a murderer, but you can't murder murder through violence. You can murder a hater, but you can't murder hate. And what we're trying to get rid of is hate, injustice, and all of these other things that continue the long night of man's inhumanity to man. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

Woman's cause is the cause of the weak; and when all the weak shall have received their due consideration, then woman will have her "rights," and the Indian will have his rights, and the Negro will have his rights, and all the strong will have learned at last to deal justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly; and our fair land will have been taught the secret of universal courtesy which is after all nothing but the art, the science, and the religion of regarding one's neighbor as one's self, and to do for him as we would, were conditions swapped, that he do for us. ~ Anna Julia Cooper

When Pope Pius XII died, LIFE magazine carried a picture of him in his private study kneeling before a black Christ. What was the source of their information? All white people who have studied history and geography know that Christ was a black man. Only the poor, brainwashed American Negro has been made to believe that Christ was white, to maneuver him into worshiping the white man. After becoming a Muslim in prison, I read almost everything I could put my hands on in the prison library. I began to think back on everything I had read and especially with the histories, I realized that nearly all of them read by the general public have been made into white histories. I found out that the history-whitening process either had left out great things that black men had done, or some of the great black men had gotten whitened. ~ Malcolm X

I don't think that I or any other Negro, as an American citizen, should have to ask for anything that is rightfully his. We are demanding that we just be given the things that are rightfully ours and that we're not looking for anything else. ~ Jackie Robinson

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future. ~ Susan Sontag

I have come from France more firmly convinced than ever that Negros should write Negro music. We have our own racial feeling and if we try to copy whites we will make bad copies ... We won France by playing music which was ours and not a pale imitation of others, and if we are to develop in America we must develop along our own lines. ~ James Reese Europe

The Negro was freed and turned loose as a penniless, landless, naked, ignorant laborer. Ninety-nine per cent were field hands and servants of the lowest class. ~ W.E.B. Du Bois

I don't care how many courses you take or how many books you read. You'll never understand what it means to be a Negro. You'll never face the discrimination they see every day. You'll never struggle the way they do. Now, enough talking. Here comes Dub. ~ Varian Johnson

The depression brought everybody down a peg or two. And the Negro had but few pegs to fall. ~ Langston Hughes

The straitjackets of race prejudice and discrimination do not wear only southern labels. The subtle, psychological technique of the North has approached in its ugliness and victimization of the Negro the outright terror and open brutality of the South. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny and their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. ~ Martin Luther King, Jr.

If anyone should ask a Negro woman in America what has been her greatest achievement, her honest answer would be, 'I survived! ~ Pauli Murray