The further jazz moves away from the stark blue continuum and the collective realities of Afro-American and American life, the mor...e it moves into academic concert-hall lifelessness, which can be replicated by any middle class showing off its music lessons.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal ...is to obtain the human rights that America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Afro-American experience is the only real culture that America has. Basically, every American tries to walk, talk, dress and b...ehave like African Americans.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The majority of Black Americans are unaware of the complexity of the meaning of Israel to American Jews. But, ironically, Afro-Zio...nists have as an intense an emotional identification with Africa and with the Third World as American Jews have with Israel. Doubly ironic, this same intensity of identification with a "Motherland" seems rooted in the mythologies common to both groups. In this special sense--in the spiritual sense implied by "Zion" and "Diaspora" and "Promised Land"MBlack Americans are America's Jews. But given the isolation of Black Americans from any meaningful association with Africa, extensions of the mythology would be futile. We have no distant homeland preparing an ingathering.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
For Afro-Americans, it could be argued that every year they've spent in this country since they arrived in chains to perform force...d labor has been 1984.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The hearts of Afro-American women are too warm and too large for race hatred. Long suffering has so chastened them that they are d...eveloping a special sense of sympathy for all who suffer and fail of justice.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Being resigned is no good; it amounts to the same as being discouraged. It breaks your two arms, and you wait around for miracles ...and for Providence, holding your rosary, doing nothing. You pray for rain, you pray for the harvest, you do your litanies to the saints and to the loas. But, let me tell you, Providence is nothing but man's will not to accept hardship, to tame, day to day, the earth's bad will, to bend the water's whims to fit his needs. Then the earth calls him 'Dear Master', and the water too calls him 'Dear Master', and there is no other Providence than his work as a serious peasant, no other miracle than the fruits of his hands.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I respect the ways of old folks, but the blood of a rooster or a goat cannot turn the seasons, change the course of the clouds and... fill them up with water like bladders. The other night, at the ceremony for Legba, I danced and sang my fill: I am a black man, no? and I enjoyed it like a true Negro should. When the drums beat, I feel it in the pit of my stomach, I feel the itch in my hips and up and down my legs, I have got to join the party. But that is all.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The old men of the village of Mahotière say that the Mistress of the Water is a mulatto woman. At midnight she comes out of the s...pring and sings while combing her dripping long hair, which makes a sound sweeter than a violin. It is a song of perdition for whomever hears it. There is no sign of the Cross, no "Our Father" to save him. Her curse takes him like a fish in a net and the Mistress of the Water awaits him on the edge of the spring and smiles upon him and tells him to follow her to the depths, from which he will never return.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »