Black America

Black America is characterized by struggle, achievement, and pride. Read quotes from influential Blacks on Black America.

A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi... has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.
Thurgood Marshall

A white face goes with a white mind. Occasionally a black face goes with a white mind. Very seldom a white face will have a black mind.
Nikki Giovanni

All peoples are struggling to blast a way through the industrial monopoly of races and nations, but the Negro as a whole has failed to grasp its true significance and seems to delight in filling only that place created for him by the white man.
Marcus Garvey

At this moment, then, the Negroes must begin to do the very thing which they have been taught that they cannot do.
Carter G. Woodson

Black Power is giving power to people who have not had power to determine their destiny.
Huey Newton

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?
June Jordan

Even if Negroes do successfully imitate the whites, nothing new has thereby been accomplished. You simply have a larger number of persons doing what others have been doing. The unusual gifts of the race have not thereby been developed, and an unwilling world, therefore continues to wonder that the Negro is good for.
Carter G. Woodson

Facing this undesirable result, the highly educated Negro often grows sour. He becomes too pessimistic to be a constructive force and usually develops into a chronic fault-finder or a complainant at the bar of public opinion.
Carter G. Woodson

For I am my mother's daughter, and 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 worth.
Mary McLeod Bethune

Here we find that the Negro has failed to recover from his slavish habit of berating his own and worshipping others as perfect beings.
Carter G. Woodson

How dare anyone tell us that Africa cannot be redeemed, when we have 400,000,000 men and women with warm blood coursing through their veins? The power that holds Africa is not Divine.
Marcus Garvey

I am not opposed to the white race as charged by my enemies. I have no time to hate any one. All my time is devoted to the up-building and development of the Negro Race.
Marcus Garvey

I feel most colored when I am thrown against a sharp white background.
Zora Neale Hurston

I freed a thousand slaves I could have freed a thousand more if only they knew they were slaves.
Harriet Tubman

I realize that I'm black, but I like to be viewed as a person, and this is everybody's wish.
Michael Jordan

I try to speak my points of view about black America, and how I feel about black men and the role that black men should play in their lives with their children and in their lives with their women.
Will Smith

I was black growing up in an all-white neighborhood so I felt like I just didn't fit in. Like I wasn't as good as everybody else or as smart, or whatever.
Halle Berry

I've always maintained that black people and women suffer from a presumption of incompetence. The burdens of proof are different. It just gets so tiresome.
Carol Moseley Braun

If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.
Marcus Garvey

If the white man wants to hold on to it, let him do so; but the Negro, so far as he is able, should develop and carry out a program of his own.
Carter G. Woodson

If you are going to think black, think positive about it. Don't think down on it, or think it is something in your way. And this way, when you really do want to stretch out, and express how beautiful black is, everybody will hear you.
Leontyne Price

In regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us.... I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm-eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! ... And if the negro cannot stand on his own legs, let him fall also. All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! ... Your interference is doing him positive injury.
Frederick Douglass, The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro

It comes down to this: black people were stripped of our identities when we were brought here, and it's been a quest since then to define who we are.
Spike Lee

It startled the nation to hear a Negro advocating such a programme after many decades of bitter complaint; it startled and won the applause of the South, it interested and won the admiration of the North; and after a confused murmur of protest, it silenced if it did not convert the Negroes themselves.
W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk, on Booker T. Washington

Let Africa be our guiding Star?OUR STAR OF DESTINY.
Marcus Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

Let us in shaping our own Destiny set before us the qualities of human JUSTICE, LOVE, CHARITY, MERCY AND EQUITY. Upon such foundation let us build a race, and I feel that the God who is Divine, the Almighty Creator of the world, shall forever bless this race of ours, and who to tell that we shall not teach men the way to life, liberty and true human happiness?
Marcus Garvey

Negroes should be more determined today than they have ever been, because the mighty forces of the world are operating against the non-organized groups of people, who are not ambitious enough to protect their own interests.
Marcus Garvey

Negroes, as they enter our culture, are going to inherit the problems we have, but with a difference. They are outsiders and they are going to know that they have these problems. They are going to be self-conscious; they are going to be gifted with a double vision, for, being Negroes, they are going to be both inside and outside of our culture at the same time. Every emotional and cultural convulsion that ever shook the heart and soul of Western man will shake them. Negroes will develop unique and specially defined psychological types. They will become psychological men, like the Jews . . . They will not only be Americans or Negroes; they will be centers of knowing, so to speak . . . The political, social, and psychological consequences of this will be enormous.
Richard Wright, The Outsider

No systematic effort toward change has been possible, for, taught the same economics, history, philosophy, literature and religion which have established the present code of morals, the Negro's mind has been brought under the control of his oppressor.
Carter G. Woodson

One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black. It was only a country for white people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States... A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn't stand it anymore... I felt liberated in Paris.
Josephine Baker

One ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
W. E. B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk

Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it.
Rosa Parks

People are taking it for granted that [the African-American] ought not to work with his head. And it is so easy for these people among whom we are living to believe this; it flatters and satisfies their self-complacency.
Paul Laurence Dunbar

So many of us find excuses to get out of the Negro Race, because we are led to believe that the race is unworthy?that it has not accomplished anything. Cowards that we are! It is we who are unworthy, because we are not contributing to the uplift and upbuilding of this noble race.
Marcus Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

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

The differentness of races, moreover, is no evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not possess. It is by the development of these gifts that every race must justify its right to exist.
Carter G. Woodson

The first point was we wanted power to determine our own destiny in our own black community. And what we had done is, we wanted to write a program that was straightforward to the people. We didn't want to give a long dissertation.
Bobby Seale, Bobby Seale Interview

The individual who can do something that the world wants done will, in the end, make his way regardless of his race.
Booker T. Washington

The needs of society determine its ethics, and in the Black American ghettos the hero is the one who is offered only crumbs from his country's table but by ingenuity and courage is able to take for himself a Lucullan feast. Hence, the janitor who lives in one room but sports a robin's-egg-blue Cadillac is not laughed at but admired, and the domestic of buys forty- dollar shoes is not criticized but appreciated.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

The Negro has loved even under severest punishment. In slavery the Negro loved his master, he safe-guarded his home even when he further planned to enslave him. We are not a race of Haters, but Lovers of humanity's Cause.
Marcus Garvey

The Negro who lives on the patronage of philanthropists is the most dangerous member of our society, because he is willing to turn back the clock of progress when his benefactors ask him so to do.
Marcus Garvey

The white kids were going to have a chance to become Galileos and Madame Curries and Edisons and Gauguins, and our boys (the girls weren't even in on it) were going to try to be Jesse Owenses and Joe Lewises.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings

There are no black conservatives. Oh, there are neoconservatives with black skin, but they lack any claim to blackness other than the biological. They have forgotten their roots.
Stephen Carter

There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity.... We cannot think of uniting with others, until after we have first united among ourselves. We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.
Malcolm X

There is always a turning point in the destiny of every race, every nation, of all peoples, and we have come now to the turning point of Negro, where we have changed from the old cringing weakling, and transformed into full-grown men, demanding our portion as MEN.
Marcus Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

They came down on us because we had a grass-roots, real people's revolution, complete with the programs, complete with the unity, complete with the working coalitions, where we crossed racial lines.
Bobby Seale, Bobby Seale Interview

We are men; we have souls, we have passions, we have feelings, we have hopes, we have desires, like any other race in the world. The cry is raised all over the world today of Canada for the Canadians, of America for the Americans, of England for the English, of France for the French, of Germany for the Germans - do you think it is unreasonable that we, the Blacks of the world, should raise the cry of Africa for the Africans?
Marcus Garvey

We black men have a hard enough time in our own struggle for justice, and already have enough enemies as it is, to make the drastic mistake of attacking each other and adding more weight to an already unbearable load.
Malcolm X

We who have been born and nurtured on this soil, we, whose habits, manners, and customs are the same in common with other Americans, can never consent to - be the bearers of the redress offered by that Society to that much afflicted country.
Richard Allen

We've always been proactive in having mentoring programs, having internships, trying to work with the unions so they can encourage more people of color getting into them.
Spike Lee

We've gone through the names-Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that's an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black?
Spike Lee