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African Americans Quotes

Browse 527 quotes about African Americans.

African Americans Quotes

“They went off and I got aboard the raft, feeling bad and low, because I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don’t get STARTED right when he’s little ain’t got no show – when the pinch comes there ain’t nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on; s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up, would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad – I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time.”

WrongRightAfrican AmericansBlacksRight And Wrong
Book:The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
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“At the age of 18 I know my color is not warning, but a welcome. A girl of color is a lighthouse, an ultraviolet ray of power, potential, and promise My color does not mean caution, it means courage my dark does not mean danger, it means daring, my brown does not mean broken, it means bold backbone from working twice as hard to get half as far. Being a girl of color means I am key, path, and wonder all in one body.”

PoetryPowerCouragePoemGirlsBlack WomenAfrican AmericansBlacksAfrican American Women
Author:Amanda Gorman
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“We've never fully addressed the legacy of slavery. Never.... For many Americans who grew up with no conversation, nothing in the cultural landscape, this is new. It's just we're now getting to a full account of this history. It's not ideological. It's not intended to be disruptive. I'm not interested in talking about these things because I want to punish America. I want to liberate us. I actually think there's something that feels more like the thriving democracy that we seek waiting for us. We can't get there if we don't have the courage to be honest about the things that have held us back.”

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Author:Bryan Stevenson
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“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. 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.”

StrengthRacismPityContemptAfrican AmericansBlacksDualityAmericans
Book:The Souls of Black Folk
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“I thought about black women and wondered how we got to be the way we were. In our country, white men were always in superior positions; after them came white women, then black men, then black women, who were historically on the bottom stratum. How did it happen that we could nurse a nation of strangers, be maids to multitudes of people who scorned us, and still walk with some majesty and stand with a degree of pride?”

StrengthPrideBlack WomenAfrican AmericansBlacksSocial Strata
Book:A Song Flung Up to Heaven
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“Gentle ladies in the days of antiquity never had to face the problems Minnie has to face. In fact, the whole conventional concept of the word 'lady' is tied up with wealth, high standing, and a sheltered life for women. Minnie has to face the world every day, in fact do battle with it." "True," said Simple, "to remain a lady, Minnie often has to fight. It is not always easy for a colored lady to keep her ladyhood." "You are bringing up race again," I said. "But this time I think you put your finger on the crux of the argument.”

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Book:The Return of Simple
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“Cyrus seemed to be thinking as he sighed, “Hakim, in a way, I think Lionel follows Lester around because niggas are scared of him. The same way niggas are scared of you. Think about it, Hakim? The only time Lionel goes around Les is when you’re gone!” Whoa! Was Cyrus making a valid point? Yes, Les had a bag, cars, girls, respect, and people feared him because he wasn’t afraid of anything, but he was nothing like... Damn it all! Cyrus was right. “Lionel started hanging around Les when I started doing my shit and leaving all the time,” I realized, holding my jaw.”

HumorConsciousnessDangerFriendsAfrican AmericansFamily RelationshipsExplicitAdult FictionPolyamorous
Book:King of Clubs
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“Come to yo’ Grandma, honey. Set in her lap lak yo’ use tuh. Yo’ Nanny wouldn’t harm a hair uh yo’ head. She don’t want nobody else to do it neither if she kin help it. Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it’s some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don’t know nothin’ but what we see. So de white man throw down de load and tell de nigger man tuh pick it up. He pick it up because he have to, but he don’t tote it. He hand it to his womenfolks. De nigger woman is de mule uh de world so fur as Ah can see. Ah been prayin’ fuh it tuh be different wid you. Lawd, Lawd, Lawd!”

FamilyInequalityGirlsYoung WomenAfrican AmericansRace Relations
Book:Their Eyes Were Watching God
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“How could she possibly keep her daughter safe from all that being black in this country weaponized against her? Protect her life, of course, but proportionally protect her mind and heart? Did any place exist where the path to her daughter finding herself wasn't obstructed? Was there ever any room in this country for little black girls to fully self-actualize?”

RacismSafetyGirlsMothersAfrican AmericansBlacksDaughtersBlack GirlsBlack Mothers
Book:Sky Full of Elephants
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“When I arrived at this all-white school that first day, all the white parents rushed in and pulled out their kids. They didn't want their children going to school with me. But why? I didn't understand. They had never met or even seen me before now, so how could they know what kind of person I was? But none of that mattered. I don't think they even saw a child. All they saw was the color of my skin. I was black, and that meant I didn't matter.”

ChildrenRacismGirlsIntegrationAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationSchoolsRuby Bridges
Book:This Is Your Time
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“I thought about all of the times, growing up, when I had sat in class and heard a white classmate say, "Well, my ancestors didn't own slaves," or heard a political commentator on television say, "Why are we still talking about slavery? People need to get over it." Or a politician say, "We can't wallow in the past. It's time to focus on the future." When I hear these deflections, I think of all the ways this country attempts to smother conversations about how its past has shaped its present. How slavery is made to sound as if it happened in a prehistoric age instead of only a few generations ago.”

AmericaHistoryHonestyRacismSlaveryAmerican HistoryAfrican AmericansBlacksReckoningConversations
Book:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
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“It is time for all of us to tell each other the truth about who and what have brought the Negro to the condition of deprivation against which he struggles today. In human relations the truth is hard to come by, because most groups are deceived about themselves. Rationalization and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our individual and collective sins. But the day has passed for bland euphemisms. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.” It would be neither true nor honest to say that the Negro’s status is what it is because he is innately inferior or because he is basically lazy and listless or because he has not sought to lift himself by his own bootstraps. To find the origins of the Negro problem we must turn to the white man’s problem.”

TruthFreedomRaceHonestyLiesAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhites
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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“When I began to do a little public speaking, one of the questions I heard most often was, "What good is science fiction to Black people?" I was usually asked this by a Black person... What good is any form of literature to Black people? What good is science fiction's thinking about the present, the future, and the past? What good is its tendency to warn or to consider alternative ways of thinking and doing? What good is its examination of the possible effects of science and technology, or social organization and political direction? At its best, science fiction stimulates imagination and creativity. It gets reader and writer off the beaten track, off the narrow, narrow footpath of what "everyone" is saying, doing, thinking -- whoever "everyone" happens to be this year. And what good is all this to Black people?”

LiteratureImaginationCreativityBooksScience FictionValueAfrican AmericansBlacks
Book:Bloodchild and Other Stories
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“She got off the train, thinking that she never felt really human until she reached Harlem and thus got away from the hostility in the eyes of the white women who stared at her on the downtown streets and in the subway. Escaped from the openly appraising looks of the white men whose eyes seemed to go through her clothing to her long brown legs. On the trains their eyes came at her furtively from behind newspapers, or half-concealed under hatbrims or partly shielded by their hands. And there was a warm, moist look about their eyes that made her want to run. These other folks feel the same way, she thought—that once they are freed from the contempt in the eyes of the downtown world, they instantly become individuals. Up here they are no longer creatures labeled simply 'colored' and therefore all alike. She noticed that once the crowd walked the length of the platform and started up the stairs toward the street, it expanded in size. The same people who had made themselves small on the train, even on the platform, suddenly grew so large they could hardly get up the stairs to the street together. She reached the street at the very end of the crowd and stood watching them as they scattered in all directions, laughing and talking to each other.”

RacePersonalityRacismIndividualityAfrican AmericansBlacksHarassmentHarlemSexual Harassment
Book:The Street
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“By the middle of the eighteenth century the black slave had sunk, with hushed murmurs, to his place at the bottom of a new economic system, and was unconsciously ripe for a new philosophy of life. Nothing suited his condition then better than the doctrines of passive submission embodied in the newly learned Christianity. Slave masters early realized this, and cheerfully aided religious propaganda within certain bounds. The long system of repression and degradation of the Negro tended to emphasize the elements of his character which made him a valuable chattel: courtesy became humility, moral strength degenerated into submission, and the exquisite native appreciation of the beautiful became an infinite capacity for dumb suffering. The Negro, losing the joy of this world, eagerly seized upon the offered conceptions of the next; the avenging Spirit of the Lord enjoining patience in this world, under sorrow and tribulation until the Great Day when He should lead His dark children home,—this became his comforting dream.”

PhilosophyReligionChristianitySlaveryDoctrinePropagandaAfrican AmericansBlacksSlaves
Book:The Souls of Black Folk
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“Streets like the one she lived on were no accident. They were the North’s lynch mobs, she thought bitterly; the method the big cities used to keep Negroes in their place. And she began thinking of Pop unable to get a job; of Jim slowly disintegrating because he, too, couldn’t get a job, and of the subsequent wreck of their marriage; of Bub left to his own devices after school. From the time she was born, she had been hemmed into an ever-narrowing space, until now she was very nearly walled in and the wall had been built up brick by brick by eager white hands.”

RacePovertyRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesInstitutional RacismNeighborhoodsGhettos
Book:The Street
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“I had also learned that the inseparable twin of racial injustice was economic injustice. Although I came from a home of economic security and relative comfort, I could never get out of my mind the economic insecurity of many of my playmates and the tragic poverty of those living around me. During my late teens I worked two summers, against my father’s wishes—he never wanted my brother and me to work around white people because of the oppressive conditions—in a plant that hired both Negroes and whites. Here I saw economic injustice firsthand, and realized that the poor white was exploited just as much as the Negro. Through these early experiences I grew up deeply conscious of the varieties of injustice in our society.”

RaceClassPovertyInjusticeAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsRacial InjusticeEconomic InjusticeEconomic Insecurity
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
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“It wasn't just this street that she was afraid of or that was bad. It was any street where people were packed together like sardines in a can. And it wasn't just this city. It was any city where they set up a line and say black folks stay on this side and white folks on this side, so that the black folks were crammed on top of each other—jammed and packed and forced into the smallest possible space until they were completely cut off from light and air. It was any place where the women had to work to support the families because the men couldn't get jobs and the men got bored and pulled out and the kids were left without proper homes because there was nobody around to put a heart into it. Yes. It was any place where people were so damn poor they didn't have time to do anything but work, and their bodies were the only source of relief from the pressure under which they lived; and where the crowding together made the young girls wise beyond their years. It all added up to the same thing, she decided—white people. She hated them. She would always hate them.”

CitiesPovertyRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationRace RelationsWhitesNeighborhoodsOvercrowding
Book:The Street
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“She and Bub went to live with Pop in that crowded, musty flat on Seventh Avenue. She hunted for a job with a grim persistence that was finally rewarded, for two weeks later she went to work as a hand presser in a steam laundry. It was hot. The steam was unbearable. But she forced herself to go to night school—studying shorthand and typing and filing. Every time it seemed as though she couldn't possibly summon the energy to go on with the course, she would remind herself of all the people who had got somewhere in spite of the odds against them. She would think of the Chandlers and their young friends—'It's the richest damn country in the world.' Mrs. Chandler wrote her a long letter and Jim forwarded it to her from Jamaica. 'Lutie dear: We haven't had a decent thing to eat since you left. And Little Henry misses you so much he's almost sick—' She didn't answer it. She had more problems than Mrs. Chandler and Little Henry had and they could always find somebody to solve theirs if they paid enough.”

WealthPovertyInequalityAmerican DreamAfrican AmericansBlacksWorkingStudyingInequityGetting Ahead
Book:The Street
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“Mom,' he said, 'why do white people want colored people shining shoes?' She turned toward him, completely at a loss as to what to say, for she had never been able to figure it out for herself. She looked down at her hands. They were brown and strong, the fingers were long and well-shaped. Perhaps because she was born with skin that color, she couldn't see anything wrong with it. She was used to it. Perhaps it was a shock just to look at skins that were dark if you were born with a skin that was white. Yet dark skins were smooth to the touch; they were warm from the blood that ran through the veins under the skin; they covered bodies that were just as well put together as the bodies that were covered with white skins. Even if it were a shock to look at people whose skins were dark, she had never been able to figure out why people with white skins hated people who had dark skins. It must be hate that made them wrap all Negroes up in a neat package labeled 'colored'; a package that called for certain kinds of jobs and a special kind of treatment. But she really didn't know what it was. 'I don't know, Bub,' she said finally. 'But it's for the same reason we can't live anywhere else but in places like this'—she indicated the cracked ceiling, the worn top of the set tub, and the narrow window, with a wave of the paring knife in her hand.”

RacePovertyRacismInequalityAfrican AmericansBlacksInequity
Book:The Street
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“Our cities have constructed elaborate expressways and elevated skyways, and white Americans speed from suburb to inner city through vast pockets of black deprivation without ever getting a glimpse of the suffering and misery in their midst. But while so many white Americans are unaware of conditions inside the ghetto, there are very few ghetto dwellers who are unaware of the life outside. Their television sets bombard them day by day with the opulence of the larger society. From behind the ghetto walls they see glistening towers of glass and steel springing up almost overnight. They hear jet liners speeding over their heads at six hundred miles an hour. They hear of satellites streaking through outer space and revealing details of the moon. Then they begin to think of their own conditions. They know that they are always given the hardest, ugliest, most menial work to do. They look at these impressive buildings under construction and realize that almost certainly they cannot get those well-paying construction jobs, because building trade unions reserve them for whites only. They know that people who built the bridges, the mansions and docks of the South could build modern buildings if they were only given a chance for apprenticeship training. They realize that it is hard, raw discrimination that shuts them out. It is not only poverty that torments the Negro; it is the fact of poverty amid plenty. It is a misery generated by the gulf between the affluence he sees in the mass media and the deprivation he experiences in his everyday life.”

CitiesClassPovertyInequalityAfrican AmericansBlacksGhettoWhitesUrban LifeInequity
Author:Martin Luther King Jr.
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“A final challenge that we face as a result of our great dilemma is to be ever mindful of enlarging the whole society, and giving it a new sense of values as we seek to solve our particular problem. As we work to get rid of the economic strangulation that we face as a result of poverty, we must not overlook the fact that millions of Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Indians and Appalachian whites are also poverty-stricken. Any serious war against poverty must of necessity include them. As we work to end the educational stagnation that we face as a result of inadequate segregated schools, we must not be unmindful of the fact, as Dr. James Conant has said, the whole public school system is using nineteenth-century educational methods in conditions of twentieth-century urbanization, and that quality education must be enlarged for all children. By and large, the civil rights movement has followed this course, and in so doing has contributed infinitely more to the nation than the eradication of racial injustice. In winning rights for ourselves we have produced substantial benefits for the whole nation.”

EducationPovertyAfrican AmericansBlacksCivil Rights MovementSchoolsWhitesNative AmericansMexican AmericansPuerto Ricans
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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“One unfortunate thing about Black Power is that it gives priority to race precisely at a time when the impact of automation and other forces have made the economic question fundamental for blacks and whites alike. In this context a slogan “Power for Poor People” would be much more appropriate than the slogan “Black Power.” However much we pool our resources and “buy black,” this cannot create the multiplicity of new jobs and provide the number of low-cost houses that will lift the Negro out of the economic depression caused by centuries of deprivation. Neither can our resources supply quality integrated education. All of this requires billions of dollars which only an alliance of liberal-labor-civil-rights forces can stimulate. In short, the Negroes’ problem cannot be solved unless the whole of American society takes a new turn toward greater economic justice.”

JusticeRaceEducationPovertyEconomicsAfrican AmericansBlacksBlack Power
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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“The hard cold facts today indicate that the hope of the people of color in the world may well rest on the American Negro and his ability to reform the structure of racist imperialism from within and thereby turn the technology and wealth of the West to the task of liberating the world from want.”

WorldChangeRacePovertyRacismNeedAfrican AmericansImperialismBlacks
Book:Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?
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“Many white Americans of good will have never connected bigotry with economic exploitation. They have deplored prejudice, but tolerated or ignored economic injustice. But the Negro knows that these two evils have a malignant kinship. He knows this because he has worked in shops that employ him exclusively because the pay is below a living standard. He knows it is not an accident of geography that wage rates in the South are significantly lower than those in the North. He knows that the spotlight recently focused on the growth in the number of women who work is not a phenomenon in Negro life. The average Negro woman has always had to work to help keep her family in food and clothes.”

PovertyAfrican AmericansBlacksIncome InequalityEconomic Inequality
Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“Yet another tactic was offered the Negro. He was encouraged to seek unity with the millions of disadvantaged whites of the South, whose basic need for social change paralleled his own. Theoretically, this proposal held a measure of logic, for it is undeniable that great masses of southern whites exist in conditions scarcely better than those which afflict the Negro. But the rationale of this theory wilted under the heat of fact. The need for immediate change was more urgently felt and more bitterly realized by the Negro than by the exploited white. As individuals, the whites could better their situation without the barrier that society places in front of a man whose racial identification by color is inescapable. Moreover, the underprivileged southern whites saw the color that separated them from Negroes more clearly than they saw the circumstances that bound them together in mutual interest. Negroes were therefore forced to face the fact that, in the South, they must move without allies; and yet the coiled power of state force made such a prospect appear both futile and quixotic.”

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Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“While Negroes form the vast majority of America's disadvantaged, there are millions of white poor who would also benefit from such a bill. The moral justification for special measures for Negroes is rooted in the robberies inherent in the institution of slavery. Many poor whites, however, were the derivative victims of slavery. As long as labor was cheapened by the involuntary servitude of the black man, the freedom of white labor, especially in the South, was little more than a myth. It was free only to bargain from the depressed base imposed by slavery upon the whole labor market. Nor did this derivative bondage end when formal slavery gave way to the de-facto slavery of discrimination. To this day the white poor also suffer deprivation and the humiliation of poverty if not of color. They are chained by the weight of discrimination, though its badge of degradation does not mark them. It corrupts their lives, frustrates their opportunities and withers their education. In one sense it is more evil for them, because it has confused so many by prejudice that they have supported their own oppressors. It is a simple matter of justice that America, in dealing creatively with the task of raising the Negro from backwardness, should also be rescuing a large stratum of the forgotten white poor. A Bill of Rights for the Disadvantaged could mark the rise of a new era, in which the full resources of the society would be used to attack the tenacious poverty which so paradoxically exists in the midst of plenty.”

PovertyLaborSlaveryDiscriminationWelfareAfrican AmericansBlacksReparationsPoor Whites
Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“The American Negro saw, in the land from which he had been snatched and thrown into slavery, a great pageant of political progress. He realized that just thirty years ago there were only three independent nations in the whole of Africa. He knew that by 1963 more than thirty-four African nations had risen from colonial bondage. The Negro saw black statesmen voting on vital issues in the United Nations—and knew that in many cities of his own land he was not permitted to take that significant walk to the ballot box. He saw black kings and potentates ruling from palaces—and knew he had been condemned to move from small ghettos to larger ones. Witnessing the drama of Negro progress elsewhere in the world, witnessing a level of conspicuous consumption at home exceeding anything in our history, it was natural that by 1963 Negroes would rise with resolution and demand a share of governing power, and living conditions measured by American standards rather than by the standards of colonial impoverishment.”

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Book:Why We Can't Wait
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“I come from a land whose democracy from the very beginning has been tainted with race prejudice born of slavery, and whose richness has been poured through the narrow channels of greed into the hands of the few. I come to the Second International Writers Congress representing my country, America, but most especially the Negro peoples of America, and the poor peoples of America—because I am both a Negro and poor. And that combination of color and of poverty gives me the right then to speak for the most oppressed group in America, that group that has known so little of American democracy, the fifteen million Negroes who dwell within our borders. We are the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word Fascism—for the American attitude towards us has always been one of economic and social discrimination: in many states of our country Negroes are not permitted to vote or to hold political office. In some sections freedom of movement is greatly hindered, especially if we happen to be sharecroppers on the cotton farms of the South. All over America we know what it is to be refused admittance to schools and colleges, to theatres and concert halls, to hotels and restaurants. We know Jim Crow cars, race riots, lynchings, we know the sorrows of the nine Scottsboro boys, innocent young Negroes imprisoned some six years now for a crime that even the trial judge declared them not guilty of having committed, and for which some of them have not yet come to trial. Yes, we Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”

AmericaRacePovertyRacismDiscriminationFascismAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationRace Relations
Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
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“Poets who write mostly about love, roses and moonlight, sunsets and snow, must lead a very quiet life. Seldom, I imagine, does their poetry get them into difficulties. Beauty and lyricism are really related to another world, to ivory towers, to your head in the clouds, feet floating off the earth. Unfortunately, having been born poor--and also colored--in Missouri, I was stuck in the mud from the beginning. Try as I might to float off into the clouds, poverty and Jim Crow would grab me by the heels, and right back on earth I would land.”

PoetryBeautyPovertyPoemsPoetsAfrican AmericansBlacksJim CrowLyricism
Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
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“So goes the life of social poet. I am sure none of these things would ever have happened to me had I limited the subject matter of my poems to roses and moonlight. But, unfortunately, I was born poor--and colored--and almost all the prettiest roses I have seen have been in rich white people's yards--not in mine. That is why I cannot write exclusively about roses and moonlight--for sometimes in the moonlight my brothers see a fiery cross and a circle of Klansmen's hoods. Sometimes in the moonlight a dark body sways from a lynching tree--but for his funeral there are no roses.”

PoetryPovertyRacismPoemsPoetsAfrican AmericansBlacks
Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
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“Oh, Lawd, I done forgot Harlem! Say, you colored folks, hungry a long time in 135th Street--they got swell music at the Waldorf-Astoria. It sure is a mighty nice place to shake hips in, too. There's dancing after supper in a big warm room. It's cold as hell on Lenox Avenue. All you've had all day is a cup of coffee. Your pawnshop overcoat's a ragged banner on your hungry frame. You know, downtown folks are just crazy about Paul Robeson! Maybe they'll like you, too, black mob from Harlem. Drop in at the Waldorf this afternoon for tea. Stay to dinner. Give Park Avenue a lot of darkie color--free for nothing!”

RacePovertyRacismHungerAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsHarlemHotelsWaldorf Astoria
Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
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“We Negroes of America are tired of a world divided superficially on the basis of blood and color, but in reality on the basis of poverty and power—the rich over the poor, no matter what their color. We Negroes of America are tired of a world in which it is possible for any group of people to say to another: "You have no right to happiness, or freedom, or the joy of life." We are tired of a world where forever we work for someone else and the profits are not ours. We are tired of a world where, when we raise our voices against oppression, we are immediately jailed, intimidated, beaten, sometimes lynched. Nicolás GuiIlén has been in prison in Cuba, Jacques Roumain, in Haiti, Angelo Herndon in the United States. Today a letter comes from the great Indian writer, Raj Anand, saying that he cannot be with us here in Paris because the British police in England have taken his passport from him. I say, we darker peoples of the earth are tired of a world in which things like that can happen.”

RacePovertyPowerRacismDiscriminationOppressionAfrican AmericansBlacksRace Relations
Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
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“These remarks reflect the expansive reach of the discourse on law and order, which since the 1970s tended to conflate "crime" with civil rights protests in the South and with the widespread turmoil generated by racism in the North. The moral panic produced by this discourse increasingly meant that the "law and order" slogan served as a proxy for more explicit calls to suppress Black movements and ultimately also to criminalize indiscriminately broad swaths of the Black population. By 1994, the deindustrialization of the U.S. economy, produced by global economic shifts, was having a deleterious impact on working-class Black communities. The massive loss of jobs in the manufacturing sector, especially in cities like Detroit, Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles, had the result, according to Joe William Trotter, that "the black urban working class nearly disappeared by the early 1990s." Combined with the disestablishment of welfare state benefits, these economic shifts caused vast numbers of Black people to seek other—sometimes "illegal"—means of survival. It is not accidental that the full force of the crack epidemic was felt during the 1980s and early '90s. During this period there were few signs of governmental effort to address the circumstances responsible for the rapid impoverishment of working-class Black communities, and the 1994 Crime Bill was emblematic of the turn to carceral "solutions" as a response to the impact of forces of global capitalism. As Cedric Robinson has pointed out, capitalism has always been racial capitalism, and the Crime Bill was a formidable indication that Republicans and Democrats in Washington were united in their acceptance of punitive strategies to stave off the effects of Black impoverishment.”

LawPovertyCrimeAfrican AmericansBlacksIncarceration
Book:Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019
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“The problem is everyone, even Black people, believes that Black poverty is the worst poverty in the world, and Black urban poverty, forget it, and all urban Blackness always scans as poverty, which means people only love us as fetish. No one is sentimental about poor Black people unless they're wise and country and you could put a photograph of them on a porch with a quilt behind them in a museum.”

RacePovertyRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsUrban LifeUrban PovertyBlack Poverty
Book:The Office of Historical Corrections
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“The McCone Report goes on to mention two other "aggravating events in the twelve months prior to the riot." One was the failure of the poverty program to "live up to [its] press notices," combined with reports of "controversy and bickering" in Los Angeles over administering the program. The second "aggravating event" is summed up by the report in these words: Throughout the nation unpunished violence and disobedience to the law were widely reported, and almost daily there were exhortations, here and elsewhere, to take the most extreme and illegal remedies to right a wide variety of wrongs, real and supposed. It would be hard to frame a more insidiously equivocal statement of the Negro grievance concerning law enforcement during a period that included the release of the suspects in the murder of the three civil rights workers in Mississippi, the failure to obtain convictions against the suspected murderers of Medgar Evers and Mrs. Violet Liuzzo, the Gilligan incident in New York, the murder of Reverend James Reeb, and the police violence in Selma, Alabama—to mention only a few of the more notorious cases. And surely it would have been more to the point to mention that throughout the nation Negro demonstrations have almost invariably been nonviolent, and that the major influence of the civil rights movement on the Negro community has been the strategy of discipline and dignity. Obsessed by the few prophets of violent resistance, the McCone Commission ignores the fact that never before has an American group sent so many people to jail or been so severely punished for trying to uphold the law of the land.”

JusticePovertyInjusticeCivil RightsAfrican AmericansProtestsPolice MisconductWatts RebellionWatts Riots
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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“The opposition to Negro education in the South was at first bitter, and showed itself in ashes, insult, and blood; for the South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.”

SchoolAmericaEducationKnowledgeLearningSouthAfrican AmericansBlacksReconstruction
Book:The Souls of Black Folk
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“There are now a number of demands being made on teachers which challenge both your courage to be flexible and your courage to remain faithful to ideals which are good. I will try to deal with just two of these demands. The first one demands flexibility. It asks you to recognize that Negro children in this society—and white children also—are being taught biased, edited, and ultimately racist versions of American history and culture. It is not enough to pay lip service to the idea of racial harmony and equality. We must refuse any longer to accept the distorted view of our roots and our past in this country. As taught in our textbooks, this history reinforces in white children the notion that they are superior and the only creators of this country, and it reinforces in black children the notion that they are inferior and made no contributions. It may be true that most blacks came here as slaves, but the first of them were here as free men, and gave their lives in the struggle to win independence for this nation. They fought as well as any one else during the civil war; they played their part in the opening of the American West; they helped plan and lay out some of our major American cities; they developed the only indigenous form of American music; they made notable contributions to scientific research; they are to be found in the growth and development of the American musical and dramatic stage; and the best of their writing ranks with the best that has been done in America. This is by no means all, but then I am by no means an historian. In any case, the question is not whether they should have done more. The miracle is that in the circumstances of their history here they could have done so much. It is because of racism, it is because the dominant value judgments in this society are white, and it is because a consistently poor estimate has been placed on the quality and extent of Negro effort—it is for all these reasons that the true story of the Negro in America is not told in our history books. And it is for all these reasons that historians continue to tell lies, continue to avert their eyes, and continue to retard the progress of civility, decency, and human dignity in our society. It is time, then, to give up that old rigid stance. For, however comforting it may be to some, it is a delusion, and it is a violation of the right of all young minds to know the truth and to be free. Organized teachers can play a major role in the effort to liberate American history books. They can join those who are making an effort to bring truth into the schools through a total revision of the textbooks. Where good texts are not in existence, teachers must bring in supplementary material to the classes. And they themselves can make studies of Negro history and culture.”

SchoolHistoryLearningRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksTeachersDistortionsEducators
Book:Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin
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