It was fear that had made him fight Gus in the poolroom. If he had felt certain of himself and of Gus, he would not have fought.
It was a highly geared world whose nature was conflict and action, a world whose limited area and vision imperiously urged men to satisfy their organisms, a world that existed on a plane of animal sen...
In the old days we were concerned with mobs, with thousands of men running amuck in the streets. The mob has conquered completely. When the mob has grown so vast that you cannot see it, then it is eve...
If only ten or twenty Negroes had been put into slavery, we would call it injustice, but there were hundreds of thousands of them throughout the country. If this state of affairs had lasted for two or...
I had never in my life been abused by whites, but I had already become as conditioned to their existence as though I had been the victim of a thousand lynchings.
I grew silent and reserved as the nature of the world in which I lived became plain and undeniable; the bleakness of the future affected my will to study. Granny had already thrown out hints that it w...
His jobs in the South were marked by harassment by whites and by his own disdain for what segregation and racism had done to distort the humanity of his fellow blacks, as he saw it.
He sat. The white cat still contemplated him with large, moist eyes.
Hate yearned to destroy and sought to forget, but love could not. Love strove creatively towards days that had yet to come.
Even the cat smilesWhen the hen swallows waterWith back-tilted head.
As he stumbled along a high bright object caught his eyes; he looked up. Atop a building across the street, above the heads of the people, loomed a flaming cross. At once he knew that it had something...
To see was not to control, that self-understanding was far short of self-mastery. He was afraid of himself.
The impulse to dream had been slowly beaten out of me by experience.
I wish I could be an example to you...I knew that I had conquered him, had rid myself of him mentally and emotionally; but I wanted to be sure.You are not an example to me; you could never be, I spat...
And when I contemplated the area of No Man’s Land into which the Negro mind in America had been shunted I wondered if there had ever existed in all human history a more corroding and devastating attac...
Would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of the hunger of life that gnaws in us all, to keep alive in our hearts a sense of the inexpressibly human
Was emotionally true because I had already grown to feel that there existed men against whom I was powerless, men who could violate my life at will. I resolved that I would emulate the black woman if...
The civilization which had given birth to Bigger contained no spiritual sustenance, had created no culture which could hold and claim his allegiance and faith, had sensitized him and had left him stra...
The city in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries in America could be an alluring place; but it also often was, for persons without brains or money or simply good luck, a crucible in w...
How oppression seems to hinder and stifle in the victim those very qualities of character which are so essential for an effective struggle against the oppressor. Then