304 Quotes About African-americans

The majority of white persons were "teetering" between a desire to cling to the pattern they had always known and a feeling that integration must take place. Any hesitation or temporary retreat on the part of Negroes would confuse white persons and drive them back to the old pattern.

This is not a story--and this is not a moment--for black people. This is a story and a moment for all Americans. And that the more Americans understand their past, understand their commitment, understand how we all are shaped by race, that gives us the kind of foundation to effect change.

I am alive in 21st Century America. I have a voice. Let it serve as a corrective to the violent and reckless power that stands against the force of love.

Enslaved people began to flee harsh conditions in Virginia and South Carolina to Spanish Florida [in the 1680s]. If an enslaved person made it there and professed his belief that Roman Catholicism was "the True Faith," the Spanish colonists would set him free. As a result, the first Black town, St. Augustine, was founded by freedmen and -women in 1687.

I had made my mind up that since I was not going to be a Negro, I would avail myself of every possible opportunity to make a white man's success; and that, if it can be summed up in any one word, means "money.

O, let my land be a land where LibertyIs crowned with no false patriotic wreath,But opportunity is real, & life is free,Equality is in the air we breathe.(There’s never been equality for me,Nor freedom in this “homeland of the free.”)

I dreaded the approach of summer, when snakes and slaveholders make their appearance. I was, in fact, a slave in New York, as subject to slave laws as I had been in a Slave State. Strange incongruity in a state called free!

Hot weather brings out snakes and slaveholders, and I like one class of the venomous creatures as little as I do the other. What a comfort it is, to be free to say so!

America! you will learn freedom feels like butter beans, potatoes & cotton seeds picked by my sturdy hands