Quotessence
Home / Topics / Blacks Quotes

Blacks Quotes

Browse 486 quotes about Blacks.

Blacks Quotes

“I knew the houses were to be searched; and I expected it would be done by country bullies and the poor whites. I expected I knew nothing annoyed them so much as to see colored people living in comfort and respectability; so I made arrangements for them with especial care.... It was a grand opportunity for the low whites, who had no negroes of their own to scourge. They exulted in such a chance to exercise a little brief authority, and show their subserviency to the slaveholders; not reflecting that the power which trampled on the colored people also kept themselves in poverty, ignorance, and moral degradation.”

RaceClassSlaveryAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsSlaves
Book:Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
Create image

“During the rush hours the sidewalks were crowded with laborers and domestic workers, many of them well past middle age, trudging patiently to their jobs and home again, sometimes as much as twelve miles. They knew why they walked, and the knowledge was evident in the way they carried themselves. And as I watched them I knew that there is nothing more majestic than the determined courage of individuals willing to suffer and sacrifice for their freedom and dignity.”

DignityCivil RightsAfrican AmericansBlacksAlabamaMontgomerySacrificesSacrificingMontgomery Bus BoycottBoycotts
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
Create image

“This growing self-respect has inspired the Negro with a new determination to struggle and sacrifice until first-class citizenship becomes a reality. This is the true meaning of the Montgomery Story. One can never understand the bus protest in Montgomery without understanding that there is a new Negro in the South, with a new sense of dignity and destiny.”

RaceDestinyRacismDignityIntegrationAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationMontgomery Bus Boycott
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
Create image

“Across the years the Negro has been a perpetual victim of economic exploitation. Prior to the Civil War the slaves worked under a system which offered neither compensation nor civil rights. Since emancipation the Negro American has continued to suffer under an essentially unreconstructed economy. He was freed without land or legal protection, and was made an outcast entitled only to the most menial jobs. Even the federal government that set him free failed to work out any long-range policy that would guarantee economic resources to a previously enslaved people--as much entitled to the land they had worked as were their former owners. The exploitation of the Negro population persisted through the Reconstruction period and continues down to the present day.”

MoneyEconomicsCivil RightsCivil WarExploitationAfrican AmericansBlacksCompensationReconstruction
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
Create image

“Nobody asked the Negro what he thunk about the whole business, by the way, nor the Indian, when I think of it, for neither of their thoughts didn't count, even through most of the squabbling was about them on the outside, for at bottom the whole business was about land and money, something nobody who was squabbling seemed to ever get enough of.”

MoneyRaceLandAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsWhitesNative AmericansIndians
Book:The Good Lord Bird
Create image

“The Negro had never really been patient in the pure sense of the word. The posture of silent waiting was forced upon him psychologically because he was shackled physically. In the days of slavery, this suppression was openly, scientifically and consistently applied. Sheer physical force kept the Negro captive at every point. He was prevented from learning to read and write, prevented by laws actually inscribed in the statute books. He was forbidden to associate with other Negroes living on the same plantation, except when weddings or funerals took place. Punishment for any form of resistance or complaint about his condition could range from mutilation to death. Families were torn apart, friends separated, cooperation to improve their condition carefully thwarted. Fathers and mothers were sold from their children and children were bargained away from their parents. Young girls were, in many cases, sold to become the breeders of fresh generations of slaves. The slaveholders of America had devised with almost scientific precision their systems for keeping the Negro defenseless, emotionally and physically. With the ending of physical slavery after the Civil War, new devices were found to "keep the Negro in his place." It would take volumes to describe these methods, extending from birth in jim-crow hospitals through burial in jim-crow sections of cemeteries. They are too well known to require a catalogue here. Yet one of the revelations during the past few years is the fact that the straitjackets of race prejudice and discrimination do not wear only southern labels. The subtle, psychological technique of the North has approached in its ugliness and victimization of the Negro the outright terror and open brutality of the South. The result has been a demeanor that passed for patience in the eyes of the white man, but covered a powerful impatience in the heart of the Negro.”

PatienceSlaveryCivil RightsPersecutionAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsImpatience
Book:Why We Can't Wait
Create image

“This determination of Negro Americans to win freedom from all forms of oppression springs from the same deep longing that motivates oppressed peoples all over the world. The rumblings of discontent in Asia and Africa are expressions of a quest for freedom and human dignity by people who have long been the victims of colonialism and imperialism. So in a real sense the racial crisis in America is a part of the larger world crisis.”

JusticeFreedomRaceOppressionColonialismAfrican AmericansImperialismEquityBlacks
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
Create image

“When a subject people moves toward freedom, they are not creating a cleavage, but are revealing the cleavage which apologists of the old order have sought to conceal. It is not the movement for integration which is creating a cleavage in the United states today. The depth of the cleavage that existed, the true nature of which the moderates failed to see and make clear, is being revealed by the resistance to integration.”

FreedomRaceSeparationCivil RightsIntegrationAfrican AmericansBlacksSegregationRace RelationsCleavage
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
Create image

“If the American Negro and other victims of oppression succumb to the temptation of using violence in the struggle for freedom, future generations will be the recipients of a desolate night of bitterness, and our chief legacy to them will be an endless reign of meaningless chaos. Violence is not the way.”

FreedomViolenceChaosCivil RightsOppressionBitternessOppressedAfrican AmericansBlacks
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
Create image

“Jim talked out loud all the time while I was talking to myself. He was saying how the first thing he would do when he got to a free State he would go to saving up money and never spend a single cent, and when he got enough he would buy his wife, which was owned on a farm close to where Miss Watson lived; and then they would both work to buy the two children, and if their master wouldn’t sell them, they’d get an Ab’litionist to go and steal them. It most froze me to hear such talk. He wouldn’t ever dared to talk such talk in his life before. Just see what a difference it made in him the minute he judged he was about free. It was according to the old saying, “Give a nigger an inch and he’ll take an ell.” Thinks I, this is what comes of my not thinking. Here was this nigger, which I had as good as helped to run away, coming right out flat-footed and saying he would steal his children – children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm. I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was such a lowering of him.”

FreedomConscienceSlaveryStealingAfrican AmericansBlacksRight And WrongSlaves
Book:The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Create image

“I thought about how Juneteenth is a holiday that inspires so much celebration, born from circumstances imbued with so much tragedy. Enslavers in Texas, and across the South, attempted to keep Black people in bondage for months, and theoretically years, after their freedom had been granted. Juneteenth, then, is both a day to solemnly remember what this country has done to Black Americans and a day to celebrate all that Black Americans have overcome. It is a reminder that each day this country must consciously make a decision to move toward freedom for all of its citizens, and that this is something that must be done proactively; it will not happen on its own. The project of freedom, Juneteenth reminds us, is precarious, and we should regularly remind ourselves how many people who came before us never got to experience it, and how many people there are still waiting.”

FreedomHistoryDemocracySlaveryCelebrationAfrican AmericansBlacksEmancipationAfrican American HistoryJuneteenth
Book:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
Create image

“When I hear Marian Anderson sing, I am a STUFFless kind of thing, Heart is like the flying air, I cannot find it anywhere. Fingers tingle. I am cold And warm and young and very old. But, most, I am a STUFFless thing When I hear Marian Anderson sing.”

PoetryMusicPoemSingersAfrican AmericansBlacksMarian AndersonVocalists
Book:Bronzeville Boys and Girls: A Picture Book of Classic Poetry About Urban Life and Childhood for Kids
Create image

“The Jackson 5 shook off the last song and readied for another sortie. The smallest Jackson movement, every tremble, elicited another wave of squeals from the Garden. "I'd like to talk to y'all tonight," Michael said, "about the blues." Carney chuckled--the kid was ten. "The blues?" Marlon or maybe Jermaine asked. "Yeah, the blues. Don't nobody have the blues like me. I may be young, but I know what it's all about." The boys bit into "Who's Lovin' You" and the building rattled. The girls screamed. There were rumors about guys the mob had rubbed out and buried in the concrete foundation below. The noise would've woken them up. Carney shouldn't have laughed. What ten-year-old black child didn't know the blues?”

MusicConcertsAfrican AmericansBlacksMusiciansBluesMichael JacksonJackson 5
Book:Crook Manifesto
Create image

“Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigor and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song—the rhythmic cry of the slave—stands to-day not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, half despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding, it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.”

ArtAmericaBeautyMusicAfrican AmericansBlacksFolk Songs
Book:The Souls of Black Folk
Create image

“All that day and all that night there sat an awful gladness in my heart,—nay, blame me not if I see the world thus darkly through the Veil,—and my soul whispers ever to me saying, “Not dead, not dead, but escaped; not bond, but free.” No bitter meanness now shall sicken his baby heart till it die a living death, no taunt shall madden his happy boyhood. Fool that I was to think or wish that this little soul should grow choked and deformed within the Veil! I might have known that yonder deep unworldly look that ever and anon floated past his eyes was peering far beyond this narrow Now. In the poise of his little curl-crowned head did there not sit all that wild pride of being which his father had hardly crushed in his own heart? For what, forsooth, shall a Negro want with pride amid the studied humiliations of fifty million fellows? Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow. Better far this nameless void that stops my life than a sea of sorrow for you.”

DeathFreedomLossGriefRacismPrejudiceMourningAfrican AmericansBlacksDeath Of A Child
Book:The Souls of Black Folk
Create image

“I remember my sister’s last hoorah. She joined all the black people I’m tired of losing, All the dead from parts of Florida, Ferguson, Brooklyn, Charleston, Cleveland, Chicago, Baltimore, wherever the names alive are Like the names in graves. I am someone With a good memory & better imagination.”

DeathPoetryLossPoemMemoryRemembranceAfrican AmericansBlacks
Book:American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin
Create image

“There is in Moscow a great curiosity for things American, and a great sympathy for things Negro. So, being both an American and a Negro, I am met everywhere with friendly questions from children and adults as to how we live at home. Is there really a crisis, with people hungry and ragged when there are in America so many factories, so much technique, so much wheat, and cotton and livestock? How can that be? Do they actually kill people in electric chairs? Actually lynch Negroes? Why? The children in the Moscow streets, wise little city children, will oft times gather around you if you are waiting for a streetcar, or looking into a shop window. They will take your hand and ask you about the Scottsboro boys, or if you like the Soviet Union and are going to stay forever. Sometimes as you pass a group of children playing, they will stop and exclaim, "Negro!" But in wonder and surprise a long ways from the insulting derision of the word "Nigger" in the mouths of America's white children. Here, the youth in the schools are taught to respect all races.”

ChildrenRacismPrejudiceSoviet UnionAfrican AmericansBlacksRace RelationsMoscowUssr
Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
Create image

“What kind of a person could kill a Black child and then kill another Black child and then kill another Black child and then kill another Black child and then kill another Black child and then kill another Black child and stay above suspicion? What about the police? What about somebody Black? What sixteen year old would say no to a cop? What seven year old would say no thanks to me? What is an overreaction to murder? What kind of a person could kill a Black child and then kill a Black child and then kill a Black child? What kind of a person are you? What kind of a person am I? What makes you so sure? What kind of a person could save a Black child? What kind of a people will lay down its life for the lives of our children? What kind of a people are we?”

ChildrenDeathPoetryPoemMurderAfrican AmericansBlacks
Author:June Jordan
Create image

“Don't you believe in nonviolence?' I asked. "'Yes,' said Miss Minnie, 'when the other parties are nonviolent, too. But when I have just come out of a funeral parlor from looking at a little small black boy shot three times by a full-grown cop, I think it is about time I raised my pocketbook and strike at least one blow for freedom.”

ChildrenViolenceRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalityRace Relations
Book:The Return of Simple
Create image

“You don’t know they’ll be white. Maybe the Cloisters is full of Black people, and you’re the right person to knock on the door.” I could hear a cross laugh in Keller’s quiet voice. “I’m pretty sure that the people who set up shop in a castle are going to be white. Museums: last refuge of the ruling class.”

MuseumsElitesAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesRuling ClassCloistersElite Class
Book:All the Water in the World
Create image

“One can tell a great deal about a country by what it remembers. By what graces the wall of its museums. And what monuments have privileged placement in parks or central traffic intersections. And what holidays and patriotic songs are the bane and balm to generations of school children. Yet one learns even more about a nation by what it forgets. What moments of evil, disappointment, and defeat are downplayed or eliminated from the national narratives. Often in the United States the issues of race and the centrality of African American culture are given short shrift in textbooks, popular chronicles, and national memories.”

RaceHistoryRacismMemoryMuseumsAfrican AmericansBlacksMonuments
Book:A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump
Create image

“This process taught us to test and challenge the prevailing wisdom about the paucity of African American artifacts. What we discovered was a paucity of effort and creativity rather than a scarcity of collections. I hope that our efforts will spur other institutions to embrace community-driven collecting and commit the resources to look inside the basements and garages for material that was once deemed less important to the interpretive agenda of museums. Not every cultural organization will discover items from Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, or Marian Anderson, but every museum that makes the effort will find discover items from Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, or Marian Anderson, but every museum, but every museum that makes the effort will find objects that document the lives, the work, the resiliency, and the dreams of their community.”

HistoryCollectionsMuseumsAfrican AmericansBlacksCollectingAfrican American HistoryCommunities
Book:A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump
Create image

“Usually Americans have traditionally viewed questions of race as ancillary episodes, interesting but often exotic eddies outside the mainstream of the American experience. Thus, it was important for the [Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture] to demonstrate through its interpretive frameworks that issue of race shaped all aspects of American life: from political discourse to foreign affairs to western expansion to cultural production.... It was also essential that the stories of the museum featured reflect the tension between moments of pain and episodes of resiliency. This must not be a museum of tragedy, but a site where a nation's history is told with all its contradictions and complexity.”

RaceHistoryMuseumsAmerican HistoryAfrican AmericansBlacks
Book:A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump
Create image

“I had always believed that the [Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture] should be a safe haven that helps Americans wrestle with and better understand the difficult current issues of race, justice, and equality. In essence, the museum is a bully pulpit that provides NMAAHC with the opportunity and responsibility to clarify and contextualize concerns that often divide or perplex the American public.... I think it is important for NMAAHC, for the Smithsonian, to engage in the public square in a manner that brings reason, knowledge, and contextualization to the contemporary challenges faced by America. Actions like this are not without risk to an institution that operates within a federal umbrella. Yet I believe that museums like NMAAHC have an obligation to use their expertise, their platform, to contribute to the greater good of a nation.”

JusticeRaceHistoryEqualityMuseumsAfrican AmericansBlacksCurrent EventsAfrican American HistoryContext
Book:A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump
Create image

“They were young black men, preying on other young black men. They had been informed, successfully, that they were worthless, and everyone who looked like them was equally without worth. Each sunrise brought a day without hope and each evening the sun set on a day lacking in achievement. Whites, who ruled the world, owned the air and food and jobs and schools and fair play, had refused to share with them any of life's necessities--and somewhere, deeper than their consciousness, they believed the whites were correct. They, the black youth, young lords of nothing, were born without value and would creep, like blinded moles, their lives long in the darkness, under the earth, chewing on roots, driven far from the light.”

Self EsteemEqualitySelf WorthAfrican AmericansBlacksWhitesBlack Youth
Book:The Heart of a Woman
Create image

“They will let you have dope Because they are quite willing To drug you or kill you. They will let you have babies Because they are quite willing To pauperize you-- Or use your kids as labor boys For army, air force, or uranium mine. They will let you have alcohol To make you sodden and drunk And foolish. They will gleefully let you Kill your damn self any way you choose With liquor, drugs, or whatever.”

DeathPoetryPoemAlcoholDrugsAfrican AmericansBlacksBabies
Book:Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings
Create image

“I see the poets, who will write the songs of insurrection generations unborn will read or hear a century from now, words that make them wonder how we could have lived or died this way, how the descendants of slaves still fled and the descendants of slave-catchers still shot them, how we awoke every morning without the blood of the dead sweating from every pore.”

PoetryPoemRacismAfrican AmericansBlacksPolice BrutalitySystemic RacismInsurrection
Book:Vivas to Those Who Have Failed: Poems
Create image

“The news of [James Baldwin's] death reached me in Trinidad around midnight. I was lecturing in the country about African-American literature and liberation, longevity and love, commitment and courage. I could not sleep. I got up and walked out of my hotel room into a night filled with stars. And I sat down in the park and talked to him. About the world. About his work. How grateful we all are that he walked on the earth, that he breathed, that he preached, that he came toward us baptizing us with his holy words. And some of us were saved because of him. Harlem man. Genius. Piercing us with his eyes and his pen. How to write of this beautiful big-eyed man who took on the country with his words? How to make anyone understand his beauty in a country that hates Blacks?”

AmericaPoetryPoemWritersRemembranceAfrican AmericansBlacksJames Baldwin
Book:Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems
Create image

“When I first saw [James Baldwin] on television in the early sixties, I felt immediately a kinship with this man whose anger and disappointment with America's contradictions transformed his face into a warrior's face, whose tongue transformed our massacres into triumphs. And he left behind a hundred TV deaths: scholars, writers, teachers, and journalists shipwrecked by his revivals and sermons. And the Black audiences watched and shouted amen and felt clean and conscious and chosen.”

AmericaPoetryPoemRemembranceAfrican AmericansBlacksJames Baldwin
Book:Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems
Create image

“And you told us: the storm is rising against the privileged minority of the earth, from which there is no shelter in isolation or armament and you told us: the storm will not abate until a just distribution of the fruits of the earth enables men (and women) everywhere to live in dignity and human decency.”

PoetryQuotesPoemEqualityAfrican AmericansEquityBlacksMartin Luther King JrMlkMlk Jr
Book:Shake Loose My Skin: New and Selected Poems
Create image