As blacks, we need not be afraid that encouraging moral development, a conscience and guilt will prevent social action. Black chil...dren without the ability to feel a normal amount of guilt will victimize their parents, relatives and community first. They are unlikely to be involved in social action to improve the black community. Their self-centered personalities will cause them to look out for themselves without concern for others, black or white.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
O my black soul! Now thou art summoned By sickness, death's herald, and champion;... Thou art like a pilgrim, which abroad hath done Treason,LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
When a bachelor of philosophy from the Antilles refuses to apply for certification as a teacher on the grounds of his color I say ...that philosophy has never saved anyone. When someone else strives and strains to prove to me that black men are as intelligent as white men I say that intelligence has never saved anyone: and that is true, for, if philosophy and intelligence are invoked to proclaim the equality of men, they have also been employed to justify the extermination of men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: for the black man there is only one destiny.... And it is white.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of m...y ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Gone are the days when my heart was young and gay, Gone are my friends from the cotton fields away,... Gone from the earth to a better land I know, I hear their gentle voices calling "Old Black Joe."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
No race has the last word on culture and on civilization. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what h...e is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I don't see black people as victims even though we are exploited. Victims are flat, one- dimensional characters, someone rolled ov...er by a steamroller so you have a cardboard person. We are far more resilient and more rounded than that. I will go on showing there's more to us than our being victimized. Victims are dead.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I marvel at the many ways we, as black people, bend but do not break in order to survive. This astonishes me, and what excites me ...I write about. Everyone of us is a wonder. Everyone of us has a story.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »