Madame C,J. Walker
It’s pretty hard for the Lord to guide you if you haven’t made up your mind which way you want
to go
I got myself a start by giving myself a start.
America doesn’t respect anything but money…. What our people need is a few millionaires with investments that start impacting startups.
David Walker
The greatest riches in all America have risen from the our blood and tears.
The bare name of educating the coloured people, scares our cruel oppressors almost to death.
Treat us like men, and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness together. For we are
not like you, hard-hearted, unmerciful and unforgiving.
Margaret Walker
Our children… do not allow us to remain cowards, complacent nor withdrawn… They force us to face the
bitterness and dare us to explain the pain. Much as it hurts, we owe them the truth.
There were bizarre beginings in old lands for the making of me.
The poetry of people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscience. The irrational, and the
collective body of our ancestral memories.
Fats Waller
One never know, do one?
They stopped me from swinging in church, so I had to swing outside.
I’d like to close with a message to my dear wife- get that man outta there, honey , ‘cause I’m coming
home directly.
Samuel Ringgold Ward
As a black man, my labors will be antislavery labors.
Among ther heviest of my maladictions against slaver is that which it deserves for keeping my poor
father- and many like him- in the midnight and dugeon of grossest ignorance.
I was born a slave – where? Whereevere it was, it was where I dare not be seen or known, lest those
who held my parents and ancestors in slavery should make a claim, hereditary or legal, in some form, to
the ownership of my body and soul.
We who are slave born derive a comfort and solace from the death of those who are dearest to us, if
they had the misfortune to be BLACKS AND AMERICANS.
Booker T. Washington
You go to school, you study about the German and the French, but not about your own race. I hope the
time will come when you study black history too.
I think I have learned the best way to lift one’s self up is to help someone else.
I learned the lessonthat great men cultivate love, and that only little men cherish a spirit of hatred.
Success always leaves footprints.
I would permit no man, no matter what color he might be, to narrow and degrade my soul by making
me hate him.
Denzel Washington
I belong to that minority among minorities- a working black actor.
My mother told me, “Never give up because you never know who’s praying for you.’”
Harold Washington
This is our country. We don’t have to slip around like peons or thieves in the middle of the night, asking
someone for open-sesame. Knock the damn door down!
As soon as we get control, the criticism becomes,. “Oh,you want to be another boss.”
If there was an honest election in Chicago, the whole country would go bananas.
Ethel Waters
Ours is the truest dignity of man, the dignity of the undefeated.
All the men in my life have been two things: an epic or an epidemic.
Ida B. Wells
Our country’s national crime is lynching. It is not a creature of an hour, the sudden outburst of
uncontrollable fury, or the unspeakable brutality of an insane mob. It represents the cool, calculated,
deliberation of intelligent people who openly avow that there is an “unwrittewn law” that justifies them
in putting human beings to death withot complaint under oath, without trial by jury, without
opportuniuty for self defense, and without rigjht of appeal.
In slave times the Negro was kept subservient and submissive by thefrequency and severity of the
scourging, but, with freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vouge; the Negro was not only
whipped and scourged; he was killed.
Nowhere in the civilized world, save the United States, do men go out in bands, to hunt down, shoot,
hang to death, a single individual.
Cornel West
Let us hope and pray that the vast intelligence, imagination, humor and courage of Americans will not fail
us. Either we learn a new language of empathy and compassion, or the fire this time will consume us all.
The major form of eveil in this country is white supremacy.
To live is to wrestle with despair yet never have despair have the last word.
Walter F. White
Lynching and mob violence, disenfranchisement, unequal distribution of school funds, the Ku Klux Klan
and all other forms of racial prejudice are for one great purpose – that of keeping the Negro in position
where he is economically exploitable.
There is magic in a white skin; there is tragedy, loneliness, exile in a black skin.
John Edgar Wideman
Color can be a cage and color conscientiousness can be terminal.
The strong survive. The ones who and strong and “lucky”.
If you’re born in black America you must quickly teach yourself to recognize the invisible barriers
disciplining the space in which you may now move.
The streets have been my stomping ground, my briar patch. The place I’d fled from with all my might,
the place always snatching me back.
Ralph Wiley
It is not enviable to be feared, but it is preferable to being lynched.
Since when did learning at school become “acting white”?. Why isn’t robbing, stealing, drinking,
carousing,and spreading illness considered “acting white”?… I’d rather have learning at school called
“ acting black.”
Roy Wilkins
( on the murderin of Emmitt Till, 1955) It would appear that the state of Mississippi has decided to
maintain white supremacy by murdering children.
Muffle your rage. Get smart instead of muscular.
No black history beomes significant or meaningfull unless it is taught in the context of world and
national history. In the sealed-off black study centers, it will simply be another exercise in breast
feeding.
Serena Williams
When you can keep playing tennis when someone is shooting at you, that’s concentration.
August Wilson
Inside all blacks is one heartbeat that is fueled by the blood of Africa.
I may be a different kind of fool, but I ain’t goona be the same fool twice.
Freedom is heavy, You got to put your shoulder to freedom. Put your shoulder to it and hope your back
hold up.
Flip Wilson
If you think nobody cares if your alive, try missing a couple of car payments.
The cost of living is going up and the chance of living is going down.
The devil made me do it.
Oprah Winfrey
You can have it all. You just can’t have it all at one time.
If you come to fame not not understanding who you are, it will define who you are.
George C. Wolfe
God created black people and black people created style.
I was thrirteen beffore I was thrust into the white world… I was parv of a generation of black children
who were raised like integration soldiers, who were groomed to invade white America,. I dom’t kmow
how conscious it was.. But with my parents it was definitely, “ They think you’re less than; you’ve got to
be better than.”
Carter Godwin Woodson
When you control a man’s thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell
him to stand here or go yonder.He will find his “proper” place and will stay in it. You do not need to send
him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for
his special benefit.
Liberty is to come to the Negro, not as a bequest but as a conquest.
Black people have been mis-educated into confusing their interests with those of dominant society.
Richard Wright
(on Lead Belly) Down south the white landlords called him a “bad nigger” and they were afraid of his
fists, his bitter biting songs , his twelve-string guitar, and his inability to take injustice and like it.
A Negro writer must create in his reader’s mind a relationship between a Negroi woman hoeing cotton
in the south and the men who loll in swivel chairs in Wall Street and take the fruits of her toil.
Negro folklore contains, in a measure that puts to shame more deliberate forms of Negro expression, the
collective sense of Negro life in America… Here are those vital beginnings of a recognition of value in life
as is is LIVED.
Malcolm X
We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock, my brothers and sisters- Plymouth Rock landed on us!
Early in life I learned that if you want something you better make some noise.
I am not against violence in self-defense. I don’t even call it violence when it’s self-defence I call it
intleligence.
In the ghettoes, he has forced us not o aspire to greater things, but to view life as survival. the white
man has build for us.
America’s greatrest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynchings, but that he taught us to
wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.
Give your brain as much attention as you do your hair and you’ll be a thgousand times better off.
If it costs me my lifeinthe morning. I will tell you tonight that the time has come for black men to die
fighting.
Frank Yerby
Greatness has nothing to do with goodness.
(on living as an expatiate) My own feeling about this is that I love my country. Unfortunately, my country
doesn’t love me enough to let me live in it.
Andrew Young
It is a blessing to die for a cause, because you can so easily die for nothing.
What people want in this world is not ideology, they want goods and services.
Politics doesn’t control the world, money does.
Whitney Young, Jr
The hardest work in the world is being out of work Liberalism seems to be related to the distance people are from the problem.
You can holler, protest, march, picket, demonstrate, but somebody must sit in on the strategy
conference and plot a course.