He has lost best friend to treachery, a wife to allegiances... an uncle to betrayal, still more friends to sorcery... He kept up the regal mask. But he could not always do it. No one can. I remember m...
For African Americans, unfreedom is the historical norm. Enslavement lasted for nearly 250 years. The 150 years that followed have encompassed debt peonage, convict lease-labor, and mass incarceration...
Everyone of any import, from Jesus to George Washington, was white.
Enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance—no matter how improved—as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable...
Enslaved is what the plunderer does to a righteous woman but a slave is a righteous woman who has accepted the plunderer's law.
Either you are a nation, or you are nothing.
Do not speak to me of martyrdom, of men who die to be remembered on some parish day. I don’t believe in dying though, I too shall die. And violets like castanets will echo me. SONIA SANCHEZ
But this girl with the long dreads revealed something else--that love could be soft and understanding; that, soft or hard, love was an act of heroism.
But the belief in the preeminence of hue and hair, the notion that these factors can correctly organize a society and that they signify deeper attributes, which are indelible—this is the new idea at t...
But rage alone is aimless, untamed, inept. When what we need is .
But a great number of educators spoke of personal responsibility in a country authored and sustained by a criminal irresponsibility.
Black life is cheap, but in America black bodies are a natural resource of incomparable value.
And you know now, if you did not before, that the police departments of your country have been endowed with the authority to destroy your body. It does not matter if the destruction is the result of a...
This is your country, that this is your world, that this is your body, and you must find a way to live within the all of it
Think we would like to kill you ourselves before seeing you killed by the streets that America made. That is a philosophy of the disembodied, of a people who control nothing, who can protect nothing,...
The month could not pass without a series of films dedicated to the glories of being beaten on camera.
That stunted imagination is something I owe to my chains.
Perhaps being named black was just someone’s name for being at the bottom, a human turned to object, object turned to pariah.
Of the Sun, Wonderful Ethiopians of the Ancient Cushite Empire, The African Origins of Civilization
Not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.