Top 100 Black American Quotes
#1. Every black American is bilingual. All of them. We speak street vernacular and we speak 'job interview.'
Dave Chappelle
#2. The problem is, there is no geographical cure. No matter where we (Black American Folk) go, we are still too plugged into this place. Our cousins, grandmothers, aunts, nieces will be in this place. And the second we start looking at it as a "them" problem, we become another problem.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#3. I didn't like any British music before The Beatles. For me, it was all about black American music. But then I became a successful pop singer, even though the kind of music I liked was more elitist, which is what I'm trying to get back to.
Lulu
#4. What happened, of course, was that I was writing a play set in the 1940's that was supposed to be somehow representative of black American life, and I didn't have any women in there. And I knew that wasn't going to work.
August Wilson
#5. I advise you to be suspicious of any black American whose family does not claim a blood connection to Native Americans. That's a clear sign of a racial infiltrator who has not done enough research.
Baratunde R. Thurston
#6. My dad was never one of those dads you could ask for a quarter if you saw a gumball machine. Instead he had one of those black American Express cards not available to general public. Gumball machines didn't have slots for those.
S.A. Bodeen
#8. We really are 15 countries, and it's remarkable that each of us thinks we represent the real America. The Midwesterner in Kansas, the black American in Durham - both are certain they are the real American.
Maya Angelou
#9. For me going down in history being the first black American to win the gold, I think more colored people are going to start coming to the gymnastics world and say 'okay, anything is possible. If Gabby did it, then I can do it too.'
Gabby Douglas
#10. I used to go to soul nights because I loved dancing, and so did my friends, and we loved the music. We used to go listen to black American soul.
Rick Astley
#11. A white American can orbit the earth, but a black American can't enter a restroom.
Ken Follett
#12. There's nothing on this green earth that a liberal progressive fears more than a black American who wants a better life and a smaller government.
Allen West
#13. The hope, the hope that lives in the breast of the black American, is just so tremendous that it overwhelms me sometimes.
Maya Angelou
#14. I'm accountable - this sounds emo - to black American writing, Southern writing, Southern black American writing, American writing and my people. That's kind of what keeps me accountable.
Kiese Laymon
#15. I'm a black American playwright. I couldn't be anything else. I make my art out of black American culture; they're all cut out of the same cloth. That's who I am; that's who I write about.
August Wilson
#16. I began to practise day and night, and the more I did, the more I was overwhelmed by the tremendous achievement of that great family of black American musicians I was beginning to know closely.
Gilad Atzmon
#17. Even though I couldn't speak English, there were many times that my black-American parents could read my mind and I could read theirs.
Kola Boof
#18. I'm a black American, I am proud of my race. I am proud of who I am. I have a lot of pride and dignity.
Michael Jackson
#19. I joke to people in the press that I realize I'm not black, I'm actually white. But I've got these roots in black American music. I love it.
Glenn Hughes
#20. It is imperative that young white men and women study the black American history. It is imperative that blacks and whites study the Asian American history.
Maya Angelou
#21. You look like a black American was his ultimate compliment, which he told her when she wore a nice dress, or when her hair was done in large braids.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#22. The project of Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man' is exactly that: to assert the beautiful, bountiful, chaotic complexity of one black American male. And, by extension, all black American males.
Victor LaValle
#23. We do not have an American culture. We have a white American culture and a black American culture. So when those two groups try to get together, [it's] very difficult because they each feel like they have the right to their culture.
Michael Emerson
#24. I was adopted my black Americans, I feel that I'm a 'Hybrid'. When I'm around Africans'I suddenly feel very black American. And when I'm around black Americans'I feel very North African. North Africa and black America are both the creators of Kola Boof.
Kola Boof
#25. One of the most widely read novels by a black American is Ralph Ellison's 'Invisible Man.' It is his masterwork - it won the National Book Award in 1953 and catapulted my man to the highest levels of literary esteem.
Victor LaValle
#26. He [Iggy] started reaching for things around the table, and his hand landed on Total. "You're black."
"I prefer canine-American," said Total.
James Patterson
#27. Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?
Philip Dray
#28. Every white person in this country-and I do not care what he or she says-knows one thing. They may not know, as they put, "what I want",but they know they would not like to be black here.
If they know that, then they know everything they need to know, and whatever else they say is a lie.
James Baldwin
#29. I want to introduce my readers to people they may never have met, take them places they may never have visited, and present them with situations they may never have encountered.
J. Everett Prewitt
#30. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#31. We believe in equality for all, and privileges for none. This is a belief that each American regardless of background has equal standing in the public forum, all of us. Because we believe this idea so firmly, we are an inclusive, rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come.
Barbara Jordan
#32. Country music is the combination of African and European folk songs coming together and doing a little waltz right here in the American south. They came together at some cotillion, and somebody snuck a black person into the room, and he danced with a white lady, and music was born.
Ketch Secor
#33. The prison industrial system, things like that are cleverly put in place to attempt to marginalize a certain group of people - and it's not only black, it's replete across the American society.
Keith Stanfield
#34. There's no question that I'm African-American. OK? I'm a black man. We're not going to escape that.
Mekhi Phifer
#35. The U.S. prosecution service is eating at the soul of the American republic. It is an absolute danger to everyone.
Conrad Black
#36. And that's the beginning of the primary conversation in African American literature, right there: the African descendant explaining to the European descendant about how white people's actions are affecting the lives of black people.* In
Mat Johnson
#37. Europeans forget that one-third of the American people have had a personal conversation with Jesus Christ and that the born-again are not just little old ladies in black but also CEOs and provosts of universities and candidates for office.
Edmund White
#38. I never said I wasn't Black ... I want to make that very clear. I said, I am not African-American. I never expected my personal beliefs and comments to spark such emotion in people. I think it is only positive when we can openly discuss race and being labeled in America.
Raven-Symone
#39. There's a thing called the 'One Drop' theory in African-American culture, which is if you have one drop of black blood in you, you're black.
Keegan-Michael Key
#40. We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.
Yvette Clarke
#41. Watergate enabled the Democrats to cut off all aid to South Vietnam and ensure American defeat in a war their party entered and had effectively lost, before Nixon salvaged a non-Communist South Vietnam while effecting a complete American withdrawal.
Conrad Black
#42. George E. Johnson marketed the "relaxer," a chemical product used to straighten otherwise curly African American hair. According to some estimates, the black hair care industry is worth more than one billion dollars annually.
Nicola Yoon
#43. I feel like because black Cuban artists don't have the kind of pressure to thematize race in the way that African-American artists do, there's more space for them to do their art without having to discuss it in terms of racial identity.
Rachael Price
#45. Civil rights for all Americans, black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera, is not a liberal or a conservative value. It's an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on.
Jerry Falwell
#46. I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African American.
Jimmy Carter
#47. I am half Puerto Rican, a quarter German and a quarter black. That was always a big issue for me - being mixed race - because casting directors tended to be very like, 'OK, are you Hispanic for this role?' 'Or is she going to be African American?'
Naya Rivera
#48. We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.
Henry Louis Gates
#49. I'm African American / I'm African / I'm black as the moon,
Kendrick Lamar
#50. I'd like to state that Spike Lee is not saying that African American culture is just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish. Culture is for everybody.
Spike Lee
#51. Did the color of his skin matter? No, Lina decided, wouldn't his racial ambiguity be a strength? Wasn't this a history from which they had all emerged, every American, black and white and every shade in between?
Tara Conklin
#52. Black women have always been these vixens, these animalistic erotic women. Why can't we just be the sexy American girl next door?
Tyra Banks
#54. There's an old saying in the black community that everybody else is protected and served but we are policed, we don't want to be policed. We want to be protected and served as any American citizen.
Benjamin Crump
#55. On one occasion, someone asked a famous American musician, Ben Harper, this question: "We've heard you now have a new drummer in your band. Tell me something: is he black?" And Harper replied: "I don't know, I've never asked him.
Mia Couto
#56. Welfare has destroyed the African-American family by telling young black women that husbands and fathers are unnecessary and obsolete. ... We have incentivized fornication rather than marriage, and it's no wonder we are now awash in the disastrous social consequences of people who rut like rabbits.
Bryan Fischer
#57. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#58. In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#59. I think it's a wonderful thing to have African-American characters. Look at life. It's not a white world or a black world; there are all kind of people in it. It's showing growth, and in today's world there are so many outlets.
Darius McCrary
#60. I'm thinking about American votes and American - all Americans, black or white have to be concerned about what's happening in the world.
Greg Gutfeld
#61. The establishment of democracy on the American continent was scarcely as radical a break with the past as was the necessity, which Americans faced, of broadening this concept to include black men.
James A. Baldwin
#62. Now we have black and white elected officials working together. Today, we have gone beyond just passing laws. Now we have to create a sense that we are one community, one family. Really, we are the American family.
John Lewis
#63. Dr. Martin Luther King is not a black hero. He is an American hero
Morgan Freeman
#64. The mainstreaming of African American history was a byproduct of the long black freedom struggle, the early black history movement, and the black student movement of the Black Power era.
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie
#65. Black people are dying in this country because we have a criminal justice system which is out of control, a system in which over 50% of young African-American kids are unemployed, it is estimated that a black baby born today has a one in four chance of ending up in the criminal justice system.
Bernie Sanders
#66. 'American Horror' goes for a very specific kind of Seventies suburban downer ambience - 'Flowers in the Attic' paperbacks, Black Sabbath album covers and late-night flicks like 'Let's Scare Jessica to Death.' It even has 'Go Ask Alice'-era urban legends.
Rob Sheffield
#67. I think that American music, for me, it's a synthesis of a lot of different things. But for me growing up in North Carolina, the stuff that I was listening to, the things that I was hearing, it was all about black music, about soul music.
James Taylor
#68. I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.
Peter Matthiessen
#69. My reason teaches me that land cannot be sold. The Great Spirit gave it to his children to live upon. So long as they occupy and cultivate it, they have a right to the soil. Nothing can be sold but such things as can be carried away
Black Hawk
#70. Native Americans were driven off their land. Lincoln even took part in the Black Hawk campaign against the Native Americans in Illinois. While they were being exterminated and driven off their land, Whites were collecting assets.
Ishmael Reed
#71. A 'death mirror' held up to American culture - Brando, bikes and black leather; Christ, chains and cocaine. A 'high' view of the myth of the American motorcyclist. The machine as totem from toy to terror. Thanatos in chrome and black leather and bursting jeans.
Kenneth Anger
#72. Our clear goal must be the advancement of the white race and separation of the white and black races. This goal must include freeing of the American media and government from subservient Jewish interests.
David Duke
#73. Donald Trump insisted yesterday that he is not racist, because one time an African-American won Apprentice. Because nothing says 'not racist' like making a black man run your errands.
Conan O'Brien
#74. It is incorrect to classify the revolt of the Negro as simply a radical conflict of black against white or as a purely American problem. Rather, we are today seeing a global rebellion of the oppressed against the oppressor, the exploited against the exploiter.
Malcolm X
#75. It's no surprise that at the same time that American universities have engaged in a serious commitment to diversity, they have been thought-prisons. We are not talking about diversity in any real way. We are talking about brown, black, white versions of the same political ideology.
Richard Rodriguez
#76. Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.
Edmund Morgan
#77. Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can.
Arthur Ashe
#78. The American Race is marked by a brown complexion; long, black, lank hair; and deficient beard.
Samuel George Morton
#79. Black children need to see their lives reflected in the books they read. If they don't, they won't feel welcome in the world of literature. The lives of African-Americans are rich and diverse, and the books our children read should reflect that.
Valerie Wilson Wesley
#80. Had middle class black women begun a movement in which they had labeled themselves "oppressed," no one would have taken them seriously.
Bell Hooks
#81. There was nothing there but black water and American fire power.
James Stockdale
#82. North Lawndale's Jewish People's Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a 'pilot community for interracial living.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#83. The American Dream is still alive and well ... it's just no longer in the United States.
Simon Black
#84. Black Friday is not another bad hair day in Wall Street. It's the term used by American retailers to describe the day after the Thanksgiving Holiday, seen as the semi-official start of Christmas shopping season.
Evan Davis
#85. Black literature is taught as sociology, as tolerance, not as a serious, rigorous art form.
Toni Morrison
#86. Dear Non-American Black, when you make the choice to come to America, you become black. Stop arguing. Stop saying I'm Jamaican or I'm Ghanaian. America doesn't care.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#87. I think inevitably over the course of my lifetime there's been an underestimation of the American people, and I believe they are really the ones that give me hope. There's so much of "they don't know this, and they don't know that," and they're always denigrating.
Lewis Black
#88. I know that I'm talented, and I know that I'm not in American Ballet Theater because I'm black - I'm here because I'm a gifted dancer.
Misty Copeland
#89. The legacy of American socialism is our blighted inner cities, dysfunctional inner city school and broken black families.
Star Parker
#90. The cornerstones of this country's operation are economic and political strength and power. The black man doesn't have the economic strength - and it will take time for him to build it. But right now the American black man has the political strength and power to change his destiny overnight.
Malcolm X
#91. The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.
Michael Eric Dyson
#92. The twenty-first-century successful black woman is brilliant and tenacious and not afraid to flex her intellectual, spiritual, or financial muscles. She has accomplished, earned, and owned more than black women of any other generation in American history.
Sophia Nelson
#93. There's no doubt that many of the mainstream white institutions tend to be cosmetic and symbolic when it comes to including African-Americans, whereas we black folk tend to be much more sensitive about embracing others, and we have a long history of that.
Cornel West
#94. There's been a lot of talk about black men and the presence and absence of black men in positions of power in American culture.
Jess Row
#95. There is no negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution
Frederick Douglass
#96. It was weird - writing is a stupid thing to do. I come up here in the morning to a pleasant room in the roof of my house and imagine I'm a black South American football superstar; then I have to imagine I'm a female pop celebrity who's pregnant. It's a completely mad way to spend your time.
Mal Peet
#97. As for my support for Obama, remember that I was brought up in Washington. It was an all-black city when I was a kid. And I've always been very pro-African-American - or whatever phrase we now use.
Gore Vidal
#98. We don't all have to take the same coordinates to get to the same destination. Being a young African American female artist, I want to open doors for young black girls.
Janelle Monae
#99. Reggie Campbell and Kathleen Goldsmith are participants in an American success story, the unprecedented boom of home-buying by African-Americans in the 1990s. Only he is black and she is white. When he moved into the neighborhood, she moved out.
Bill Dedman
#100. To handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. It kills one's aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime.
Carter G. Woodson
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