It is interesting that a guy like W.E.B. Du Bois, who actually did very little, I should imagine, with his hands, wrote about "I am the smoke king." Without the labor, both free and slave, of African Americans this country would still be a wilderness.

and neither of them ever said what they meant and i guess nobody ever does

Ntozake Shange tells us it's not so good to be born a girl. She does not object to being born a girl. She objects to what it means when you are born a girl. She objects to the way that girls are treated. She objects to the way that our dreams are stifled. She objects to the way that we are not taken seriously, we are there as some sort of plaything,

We look, most humans, for a way to be warm and safe; for a haven for our bodies when, once fire was discovered and clothes invented, when once we understood why the squirrels moved seeds around and what to call the plant the jaguar got giggly off of, when once we no longer worried about being eaten by other mammals or each other we looked for meaning with this life we were given.

honey, ain't never been wrong yet you better get back to the city cause you one of them technical niggers and you'll have problems here

Of the many foundations upon which humans rest, words are probably the most solid.

Poems have serious business to do They need to bring down presidents whoStart wars they themselves wouldn't go to

shame the bad comfort the good do the rosa parks just like she would

what you doing here" she asked "i'm a poet" i said "that ain't no reason to be uppity