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 »
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 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 »
Negro history must be studied, not only because it is the history of over 19 millions, but American life as a whole cannot be unde...rstood without knowing it.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It was common practice for me to take my children with me whenever I went shopping, out for a walk in a white neighborhood, or jus...t felt like going about in a white world. The reason was simple enough: if a black man is alone or with other black men, he is a threat to whites. But if he is with children, then he is harmless, adorable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I looked at my daughters, and my boyhood picture, and appreciated the gift of parenthood, at that moment, more than any other gift... I have ever been given. For what person, except one's own children, would want so deeply and sincerely to have shared your childhood? Who else would think your insignificant and petty life so precious in the living, so rich in its expressiveness, that it would be worth partaking of what you were, to understand what you are?LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I cannot be soft because it will make her soft, I thought, and soft black children cannot survive in this world. I do not know if ...this is true, but it was (and is) for me an undying truism.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I could be, I discovered, by turns stern, loving, wise, silly, youthful, aged, racial, universal, indulgent, strict, with a remark...ably easy and often cunning detachment ... various ways that an adult, spurred by guilt, by annoyance, by condescension, by loneliness, deals with the prerogatives of power and love.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
"Do you like being a parent--you know, being a father, having children and all?" Linnet once asked me. "Yes," I said, after a mome...nt. "It's like dancing with a partner. It takes a lot of effort to do it well. But when it's done well it's a beautiful thing to see."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 »