Quotes · Skopia

23 quotes

SortEditorial Year Length

Topic·Black experience✕clear

My father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no Fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?

1956

★ 1.8

Autobiography and memoir

My feelings are too intense. I hate bitterly, I love too exaltingly, I pity to extravagantly, I hurt too painfully. We American blacks call that "soul."

1972

★ 1.8

My life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart.

Notes of a Native Son · 1955

★ 2.1

Film · Biography (film) · Drama (film) · Biography · Drama

You are not an American, you are the victim of America!

Malcolm X · 1992

★ 2.3

I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes... I do not weep at the world-I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife.

Zora Neale Hurston

1928

★ 3.5

Goddammit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like living in jail.

Native Son · 1940

★ 3.6

Though it be a thrilling and marvelous thing to be merely young and gifted in such times, it is doubly so, doubly dynamic-to be young, gifted and black.

Lorraine Hansberry

1964

★ 3.6

Autobiography and memoir

Being a star has made it possible for me to get insulted in places where the average Negro could never hope to go and get insulted.

Sammy Davis, Jr.

1965

★ 3.6

It comes as a great shock around the age of 5, 6, or 7 to discover that the flag to which you have pledged allegiance, along with everybody else, has not pledged allegiance to you. It comes as a great shock to see Gary Cooper killing off the Indians, and although you are rooting for Gary Cooper, that the Indians are you.

The New York Times · 1965

★ 3.6

It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others... One feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivngs; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

The Souls of Black Folk · 1903

★ 3.7

Speech · Political speech

We didn't land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us.

The Ballot or the Bullet · 1964

★ 4.0

Being born a slave in a captive society and never experiencing any objective basis for expectation had the effect of preparing me for the progressively traumatic misfortunes that lead so many black men to the prison gate. I was prepared for prison. It required only minor psychic adjustments.

1970

★ 4.3

Film · Biography (film) · Drama (film) · Biography · Drama

We didn't land on Plymouth Rock—Plymouth Rock landed on us!

Malcolm X · 1992

★ 4.8

Now I was eight and very small, And he was no whit bigger, And so I smiled, but he poked out His tongue, and called me, "Nigger." I saw the whole of Baltimore From May until December; Of all the things that happened there That's all that I remember.

Incident · 1925

★ 5.0

Southern trees bear a strange fruit, Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black body swinging in the Southern breeze, Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

1937

★ 5.1

Sociology · Political literature

To be a Negro is to participate in a culture of poverty and fear that goes far deeper than any law for or against discrimination... After the racist statues are all struck down, after legal equality has been achieved in the schools and in the courts, there remains the profound institutionalized and abiding wrong that white America has worked on the Negro for so long.

Michael Harrington

The Other America · 1962

★ 5.1

I am an invisible man... I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids-and I might even be said to posses a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.

Invisible Man · 1952

★ 5.3

Comedy special · Comedy (stand up)

Every black dude in this room is a qualified paralegal and shit. He knows the law. If one of us even start to do something wrong, an old black man would pop out of nowhere. Nigga, don’t do that. That’s 5 to 10.

Killin' Them Softly · 2000

★ 5.3

Speech · Political speech

The ground which a colored man occupies in this country is, every inch of it, sternly disputed.

Frederick Douglass

1853

★ 5.5

Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house?

The Souls of Black Folk · 1903

★ 5.5

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