African Americans Quotes

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.”

What is ghastly and really almost hopeless in our racial situation now is that the crimes we have committed are so great and so unspeakable that the acceptance of this knowledge would lead, literally, to madness. The human being, then, in order to protect himself, closes his eyes, compulsively repeats his crimes, and enters a […]

A closed window looks down on a dirty courtyard, and Black people call across or scream across or walk across defying physics in the stream of their will. Our world is full of sound Our world is more lovely than anyone’s tho we suffer, and kill each other and sometimes fail to walk the air. […]