The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not […]
African Americans Quotes
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
The drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his (or her) worth.
Discrimination in education is symbolic of all the more drastic discrimination in which Negroes suffer. In the American life, the equal protection clause in the Fourteenth Amendment furnishes the key to ending separate schools.
From my background, I gained my regulating Christian ideals. From Gandhi I learned my operational technique.
There’s something wrong with the system. It’s designed for you not to make it. And if you make it, it’s designed for you not to keep it.
No great poet has ever been afraid of being himself. We younger Negro artists now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they aren’t, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too… If colored people are pleased we are […]
I say good night to you by quoting the words of an old Negro slave preacher, who said, “We ain’t what we ought to be and we ain’t what we’re going to be. But thank God, we ain’t what we was.”
Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to get insulted.
It was the police who tracked us as we fled the plantation. It was the police who took Rosa Parks off the bus in Montgomery, Ala. It was Police Chief “Bull” Connor who set dogs and fires hoses on black men, women and children in Birmingham, Alabama… I am well aware of the black criminal, […]
