You see? I just wrote ‘black American.’ I couldn’t even bring myself to write “African American.” It’s a phrase that, for me, doesn’t roll naturally off the tongue: “African American.” Is that what we really are? Is there anything really “African” left in the descendants of those original slaves who made that tortuous journey across […]
Black Quotes
Then all at once, with the mercurial changeability of the magnificently smashed, he forgot he was angry at her. “You know,” he said conversationally, “it’s a long time indeed I been wonderin’ why your own folk ever gave up so gorgeous a name as The Colored – I don’t understand it, be dipped if I […]
Finally the captain said, “Come here, nigger.” I walked directly to him. “What can I do for you?” I asked. “Nigger,” he said menacingly, “you’re supposed to be scared when you come in here!” – “I am fortified by truth, justice and Christ,” I said. “There is no need for me to fear.” He was […]
The haughty American nation – makes the Negro clean its boots and then proves the moral and physical inferiority of the Negro by the fact he is a bootblack.
Black families have always talked openly about white ancestors and relatives. In hotbeds of race-mixing like New Orleans or Charleston, S.C., black and white branches of a family sometimes lived so close at hand that they ran into one another on the street, and black children were warned that their pale relatives could react violently […]
There’s not enough troops in the Army… to force the Southern people to… admit the Negro race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes and into our churches.
