When we are first generations and we come into money like that, we feel obligated to bring everybody with us. I think that’s real specific to our culture, and it’s almost expected.
African Americans Quotes
I think that Elvis was more acceptable being white back in that period. I believe that if Elvis had been Black, he wouldn’t have been as big as he was. If I was white, do you know how huge I’d be? If I was white, I’d be able to sit on top of the White […]
A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T. Washington to visit — to dine at the White House — was taken as an outrage in many quarters. America today is a world away from the cruel and prideful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of […]
Quality film-making is the key. You don’t wanna do films with black casts and directors just for the sake of doing it. Critical acclaim and commercial success is the goal. Also the way we work together as artists; giving to one another and sharing in the work. That’s what a renaissance is: artists who wanna […]
I didn’t become an actor to make a point. I became an actor to create, and I am an actor before I’m black.
Kwanzaa is a cultural holiday not a religious one. And it builds on African commonality, not on the religious, political and other choices we make which often separate us and cause us to focus on difference rather than similarity. In the final analysis, it all depends on personal choice; people choose holidays to celebrate, religions […]
Of my ancestry I know almost nothing. In the slave quarters, and even later, I heard whispered conversations among the coloured people of the tortures which the slaves, including, no doubt, my ancestors on my mother’s side, suffered in the middle passage of the slave ship while being conveyed from Africa to America.
I’m the heir of a proud legacy of Black soldiers who went before me, the buffalo soldiers of the post-Civil War period, the Tuskegee Airmen. And what was put into me was that we served and sacrificed at a time when our nation was not prepared to serve us or sacrifice for us. But we […]
“But white people act up too.” Yes, but Garth Brooks does not bring a “piece” to the Grammys, and Martin Scorsese does not get into ugly scuffles on the street. There is a fine line between playing the bad boy and becoming one, and in the “hip-hop community” too often violence jumps out of the […]
Now in the South we faced mobs, but it would be a couple of hundred, or even fifty or seventy-five. The violence in the South always came from a rabble element. But these were women and children and husbands and wives coming out of their homes becoming a mob (in Chicago) – and in some […]
