Well, hell, if people keep telling you you ain’t no good’ - she [Leona] tried to laugh - ‘you bound to turn out pretty bad.
We have all had the experience of finding that our reactions and perhaps even our deeds have denied beliefs we thought were ours. --The Crusade of Indignation, in Nation (New York, 7 July 1956; repr....
We are in the middle of an immense metamorphosis here, a metamorphosis which will, it is devoutly to be hoped, rob us of our myths and give us our history, which will destroy our attitudes and give us...
Wash me, cried the slave to his Maker, and I shall be whiter, whiter than snow!
Until I die there will be those moments, moments seeming to rise up out of the ground like Macbeth's witches, when his face will come before me, that face in all its changes, when the exact timbre of...
To know a thing you must see it first, and to see you must look with an open mind.
To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger. In this case, the danger, in the minds of most white Americans, is the loss of their identity.
To accept one’s past—one’s history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it. An invented past can never be used; it cracks and crumbles under the pressures of life like cl...
Time catches up with kingdoms and crushes them, gets its teeth into doctrines and rends them; time reveals the foundations on which any kingdom rests, and eats at those foundations, and it destroys do...
Thursday’s great event was Aimé Cesaire’s speech in the afternoon, dealing with the relation between colonization and culture.
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.
They began to care less about the way they looked, the way they dressed, the things they did; presently, one found them in twos and threes and fours, in a hallway, sharing a jug of wine or a bottle of...
There are few things under heaven more unnerving than the silent, accumulating contempt and hatred of a people.
There are few things more dreadful than dealing with a man who know that he is going under in his own eyes, and in the eyes of others. Nothing can help that man.
Their faith may be described as childlike, but the end it serves is often sinister. It may, indeed, keep them happy—a phrase carrying the inescapable inference that the way of life imposed on Negroes...
The train will be the same, the people, struggling for comfort and, even, dignity on the straight-backed, wooden, third-class seats will be the same, and I will be the same.
The terrible thing about being a Negro leader lies in the term itself. I do not mean merely the somewhat condescending differentiation the term implies, but the nicely refined torture a man can experi...
The states of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable. We all know this, but we would rather not know it. The artist is present to correct the delusi...
The root of the black man’s hatred is rage, and he does not so much hate white men as simply wants them out of his way, and, more than that, out of his children’s way.
The real troubles with living is that living is so banal. Everyone, after all, goes the same dark road—and the road has a trick of being the most dark, most treacherous, when it seems most bright—and...