When in the enfranchisement of the black men [women] saw another ignorant class of voters placed about their heads, and beheld the... danger of a distinctively "male" government, forever involving the nations of the earth in war and violence; and demanded for the protection of themselves and children, that woman's voice should be heard and her opinions in public affairs be expressed by the ballot, they were coolly told that the black man had earned the right to vote, that he had fought and bled and died for his country. It was not because the three-penny tax on tea was so exorbitant that our Revolutionary fathers fought and died, but to establish the principle that such taxation was unjust. It is the same with this woman's revolution; though every law were as just to woman as to man, the principle that one class may usurp the power to legislate for another is unjust, and all who are now in the struggle from love of principle would still work on until the establishment of the grand and immutable truth, "All governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed."LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
I do not think that literature is the primary instrument for social transformation, but I do think it has potency. So I work to te...ll the truth about people's lives; I work to celebrate struggle, to applaud the tradition of struggle in our community, to bring to center stage all those characters, just ordinary folks on the block, who've been waiting in the wings, characters we thought we had to ignore because they weren't pimp-flashy or hustler-slick or because they didn't fit easily into previously acceptable modes or stock types. I want to lift up some usable truths ...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 »
...black women write differently from white women. This is the most marked difference of all those combinations of black and white..., male and female. It's not so much that women write differently from men, but that black women write differently from white women. Black men don't write very differently from white men.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The black artist is dangerous. Black art controls the "Negro's" reality, negates negative influences, and creates positive images.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The Golden Rule furnishes the true solution of many difficult problems in government and society. Bishop [Atticus G.] Haygood, an ...ex-slaveholder and an ex-Confederate soldier, has given us the best book on the negro question. The title of his work ... tells the whole story: "Our Brother in Black." When reformers, religious teachers, and statesmen, and the general public lift themselves up to the height of the argument contained in that pithy title, there will no longer be a negro problem, nor a problem of capital and labor, nor any question as to the treatment of the criminal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Mighty few young black women are doin' domestic work. And I'm glad. That's why I want my kids to go to school. This one lady told ...me, "All you people are gettin' like that." I said, "I'm glad." There's no more gettin' on their knees.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
The notion that black folks have nothing to learn from scholarship that may reflect racial or racist biases is dangerous. It promo...tes closed-mindedness and a narrow understanding of knowledge to hold that "race" is such an overwhelming concept that it negates the validity of any insights contained in a work that may have some racist or sexist aspects.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Racism is when you have laws set up, systematically put in a way to keep people from advancing, to stop the advancement of a peopl...e. Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing ... then it will be done, but not until then.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »