304 Quotes About African-americans

The freedoms that we have were purchased not just by those in uniform—and they definitely were—but also by those who took their lives into their hands, riding those Greyhound buses—the Freedom Riders, in the deep south, in the 1960s, who knew full well that they would be arrested, and they were, serving time, in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Rosa Parks, getting from the back of the bus to the front of the bus. Peaceful, nonviolent protest.

When a man has his wages stolen from him, year after year, and the laws sanction and enforce the theft, how can he be expected to have more regard to honesty than the man who robs him?

I was too familiar with slavery not to know that promises made to slaves, though with kind intentions, and sincere at the time, depend on many contingencies for their fulfillment.

Do You Follow Me We are the wrong people of the wrong skin on the wrong continent and what in the hell is everybody being reasonable about

I thought I should be allowed to go to my father's house the next morning, but I was ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress's house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me. What cared my owners for that? he was merely a piece of property.

It is a difficult thing for a white man to learn what a colored man really thinks; because, generally, with the latter an additional and different light must be brought to bear on what he thinks; and his thoughts are often influenced by considerations so delicate and subtle that it would be impossible for him to confess or explain them to one of the opposite race.

[Those at the Negro Leaders Conference on Nonviolent Integration in Atlanta in 1957] expressed their realization that "equality" is not enough if it merely means Negroes' fighting for equality of opportunity within a corrupt and competitive social order.

I noticed that among this class of colored men the word "nigger" was freely used in about the same sense as the word "fellow," and sometimes as a term of almost endearment; but I soon learned that its use was positively and absolutely prohibited to white men.

Do you know, I don't object to anyone's having prejudices so long as those prejudices don't interfere with my personal liberty.