[A] lot of them, without even understanding the cause, just give up. They take what they can-mostly in pleasure,and they make the grand gesture, the wild gesture, because what have they got to lose if...
In Black Like Me, I tried to establish one simple fact, which was to reveal the insanity of a situation where a man is judged by his skin color, by his philosophical accident - rather than by who he i...
I must have had a dozen rides that evening. They blear into a nightmare, the one scarcely distinguishable from the other. It quickly became obvious why they picked me up. All but two picked me up the...
We were Negroes and our concern was the white man and how to get along with him; how to hold our own and raise ourselves in his esteem without for one moment letting him think he had any God-given rig...
We, who were reduced to eating on the sidewalk , were suddenly elevated in status by this man's misery. We were the aristocrats and he the beggar. It flattered us. We were superbly above him and the c...
The great danger in the South comes precisely from the fact that the public is not informed. Newspapers shirk notoriously their editorial responsibilities and print what they think their readers want....
I learned a strange thing... that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word nigger leaps out with electric clarity. You always hear it and it always stings. And always it casts the person using it...
It was a little thing, but on top of the other little things, it broke something in me.
Certainly many Northern cities deplored what was going on in the South. But when Martin Luther King, who had been so praised in the North for the work he did in the South, came to work in the cities o...
The author meets an African-American who observes that his fellows who begin with aspirations to a good education, solid career, and the raising of a family slowly lose that incentive. Even those who...
DESEGREGATE THE BUSES WITH THIS 7 POINT PROGRAM:1. Pray for guidance.2. Be courteous and friendly.3. Be neat and clean.4. Avoid loud talk.5. Do not argue.6. Report incidents immediately.7. Overcome ev...
All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy.
Humanity does not differ in any profound way; there are not essentially different species of human beings. If we could only put ourselves in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we migh...
Someone in a high place - the mayor, chief of police, or other official - would receive information that a neighboring city was already in flames and that carloads of armed black men were coming to at...
Some wanted to know where they could find girls, wanted us to get Negro girls for them. We learned to spot these from the moment they sat down, for they were immediately friendly and treated us with t...
A love for his child was so profound, it spilled over to all humanity.
[C]ulture-learned behavior patterns so deeply engrained they produce unconscious involuntary reactions-is a prison.
But there are differences. The social studies I’ve read … They don’t deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white, I said. They only study the effects of environment on human...
You can't get around what's right, though, he said. When we stop loving them, that's when they win.
To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue.