Quotes on Black

An organization which claims to be working for the needs of a community - as SNCC does - must work to provide that community with a position of strength from which to make its voice heard. This is the significance of black power beyond the slogan

It now lately sometimes seemed a black miracle to me that people could actually care deeply about a subject or pursuit, and could go on caring this way for years on end. Could dedicate their entire lives to it. It seemed admirable and at the same time pathetic. We are all dying to give our lives away to something, maybe.

I started making work that I assumed would be far too garish, far too decadent, far too black for the world to care about. I, to this day, am thankful to whatever force there is out there that allows me to get away with painting the stories of people like me.

I was wearing black clothes almost from the beginning. I feel comfortable in black. I felt like black looked good onstage, that it was attractive, so I started wearing it all the time.

I am excited to have a black president because white supremacy is real and it needs to be shattered.

You know, one of the ways we adapted to not being free was to think that our group identity was again, the way we were being black, and being down with the cards. That was the way we were going to get it. Unity was everything.

When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.

The solution of this country's problems lies in black hands.

Since I began presenting programmes about black history my life has become a constant impromptu focus group. I am stopped in the street by people who want to talk about the histories those documentaries explore.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

They're powerful, those songs. At times they've been my only way back, the only door out of the dark, bad places the black dog calls home.

I wore black because I liked it. I still do, and wearing it still means something to me. It's still my symbol of rebellion -- against a stagnant status quo, against our hypocritical houses of God, against people whose minds are closed to others' ideas.

For, while the tale of how we suffer, and how we are delighted, and how we may triumph is never new, it always must be heard. There isn't any other tale to tell, it's the only light we've got in all this darkness.

Until the legacy of remembered and reenacted trauma is taken seriously, black America cannot heal.

As sure as God made black and white, what's done in the dark will be brought to the light.

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down, Livin’ in the hopeless, hungry side of town.

I remember one of them - it was a 1941 black Ford. As it went by very slow, a guy leaned out with a shotgun, keeping a bead on us all the time, and we just had to walk slowly and wait for him to kill us... They didn't kill us, but they didn't end it, either.

Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.

I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time, but to do so in order to come out on the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color.

I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day. What hours, O what black hours we have spent This night!