In Harlem, Negro policemen are feared more than whites, for they have more to prove and fewer ways to prove it
I stared at absurd Paris, which was as cluttered now, under the scalding sun, as the landscape of my heart.
For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become. It will be hard, James, but you com...
Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection and to transform their moral contradictions, or public discussion of such...
When he died I had been away from home for a little over a year. In that year I had had time to become aware of the meaning of all my father’s bitter warnings, had discovered the secret of his proudly...
They have never put it into words, they cannot; but each absence is a threat. They never felt this way in New York - they moved all over New York. Here each is afraid that one of the others will get i...
For nothing is fixed, forever and forever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease...
To begin with, the room was not large enough for two. It looked out on a small courtyard. 'Looked out' means only that the room had two windows, against which the courtyard malevolently pressed, encro...
It's the only light we've got in all this darkness
Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law.
The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe, as well as what they do and...
On each piece of paper I found addresses, telephone numbers, memos of various rendezvous made and kept—or perhaps not kept—people met and remembered, or perhaps not remembered, hopes probably not fulf...
The American ideal, after all, is that everyone should be as much alike as possible.
I can't be a pessimist because I'm alive. To be a pessimist means that you have agreed that human life is an academic matter.
The first time I saw Reverend Shuttlesworth, for example, he came strolling across the parking lot of the motel where I was staying, his hat perched precariously between the back of his skull and the...
At the root of the American Negro problem is the necessity of the American white man to find a way of living with the Negro in order to be able to live with himself.
The rage of the disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also so absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood even among the people whose daily bread it is, is...
It is considered a rather cheerful axiom that all Americans distrust politicians. (No one takes the further and less cheerful step of considering just what effect this mutual contempt has on either th...
A mob is not autonomous: it executes the real will of the people who rule the State. The slaughter in Birmingham, Alabama, for example, was not merely the action of a mob.
She fitted in my arms, she always had, and the shock of holding her caused me to feel that my arms had been empty since she had been away.