Quotes on Black

Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning, and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us.

My mother instilled in my sister, Maya, and me the values that would chart the course of our lives. She raised us to be proud, strong Black women. And she raised us to know and be proud of our Indian heritage.

I did not learn the flaws of the criminal-justice system in law school or college or by reading about it. I grew up knowing the flaws and how it was disproportionately impacting the black community. It's not academic for me.

Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.

I had explained that a woman's asking for equality in the church would be comparable to a black person's demanding equality in the Ku Klux Klan

If Obama's enormous symbolic power draws primarily from being the country's first black president, it also draws from his membership in hip-hop's foundational generation.

A poetess who had died young of cancer had said in one of her poems that for her, on sleepless nights, 'the night offers toads and black dogs and corpses of the drowned.

It's a pity that nobody has found an exploding black hole. If they had, I would have won a Nobel prize.

I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.

Know the white, But keep the black, Be an example to the world! Being an example to the world, Ever true and unwavering, Return to the infinite.

There is a twinge of abandonment that comes with being a member of the African Diaspora. But 'Black Panther' fearlessly introduces and then complicates this and other deeply held albeit rarely expressed emotions; that indeed is what makes this film so profoundly innovative.

I think that what we need to do is say, 'Reading is going to really affect your life.' You take a black man who doesn't have a job, but you say to him, 'Look, you can make a difference in your child's life, just by reading to him for 30 minutes a day.' That's what I would like to do.

Before the advent of the white man, black people were doing all kinds of things with their hair. The rejection of kinks and curls did come with the white man.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

I remember being in a history lesson and saying to my teacher, 'How come you never talk about black scientists and inventors and pioneers?' And she looked at me and said, 'Because there aren't any.'

I was raised a black child in the South, where you're indoctrinated into a religion that an oppressor gave you.

In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.

I remember the first time I went to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and saw a Kerry James Marshall painting with black bodies in it on a museum wall... It strengthened me on a cellular level.

As a black man, I actually had naturally sort of comedic curiosity about the Klan.

When things aren't going well for black people, they blame the government. When things aren't going well for white people, they can't blame the government because the government is supposed to be for them. So they blame black people.

Whether defending our nation as a Black Hawk pilot abroad or serving our veterans and those in need at home, my life has been enriched by the opportunities I've had to serve my country and fellow citizens, both in and out of uniform.