Black People In America Quotes

#1. One of the worst things that happened to black people in America historically is integration. People ask me why I say that and I tell them it's because we gave up all of our control.

David Banner

#2. A lot of young black people in America, and even in Africa and Brazil, would say that they are telling their story, but most of the films are like application forms with the formulaic ideas of Hollywood.

Haile Gerima

#3. Black people in America have to, for their own protection, develop a defense mechanism, and I just grew terribly tired of it.

Randall Robinson

#4. Frankly, I think that's something that black people in America have often done - finding ways under very, very difficult circumstances to be subversive, but also to push things forward. And I think that applies to music. I think it applies to dance. I think it applies to a number of things.

Andre Holland

#5. Black people in America will never be free so long as they're on the white man's land ... We can't be free until we get our own land and our own country in North America. When we separate from America and take maybe ten states, then we'll be free.

Muhammad Ali

#6. Music played a large role in the survival of the black people in America - that and a sense of humor that just couldn't be enslaved.

Redd Foxx

#7. If you're born in America with a black skin, you're born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.

Malcolm X

#8. It was natural to see the struggle for dignity for black people in America as a sister struggle of the Jewish struggle. So growing up, it was always a part of my breakfast cereal to think of myself as someone who was part of a larger struggle.

Eugene Jarecki

#9. It's almost like a lot of black people in America, a lot of young black men, are born with this cloud over their heads. It's their penitentiary cloud, this philosophy we all have, that it's harder for us.

Erykah Badu

#10. Racial oppression of black people in America has done what neither class oppression or sexual oppression, with all their perniciousness, has ever done: destroyed an entire people and their culture.

Eleanor Holmes Norton

#11. You don't need someone destroying you when your own people are the worst messengers possible. And this is what black people in America have not come to grips with.

Geoffrey Canada

#12. Without the presence of black people in America, European-Americans would not be "white"
they would be Irish, Italians, Poles, Welsh, and other engaged in class, ethnic, and gender struggles over resources and identity. (p. 107-108)

Cornel West

#13. Black people in America have come from slavery to other forms of being oppressed and there are some things that come with that - some pain and anger that come with that and we as black people have to deal with it to heal that. White people have to understand it and have some compassion toward it.

Common

#14. I'm black and Cuban, Australian and Irish, and like most people in America, I'm someone whose roots come from somewhere else. I'm a mixed race, first-generation American.

Soledad O'Brien

#15. How come the Chinese can go where I can't go in America? Englishmen can come and set up a business in white America and do things I can't do.The Puerto Rican, Hawaiians, just about everybody can do more than black people and are more respected.

Muhammad Ali

#16. As a child, I experienced black culture as many people did in America: on the TV, radio, and stages.

Shawn Amos

#17. Does anyone in this room have it?"
"No, Chris, no one here has it."
"How do you know?"
"Because the mark was dark skin. Negroes are the descendants of Cain."
I didn't have my civil-rights sensibilities yet, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about God ...

Chris Crutcher

#18. I continue to care for President Obama and for his family. I think that in many ways they are very courageous people, and I honor that, because I know what it means to live as a black person in a racist America.

Alice Walker

#19. Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land.

Cornel West

#20. My heart isn't big enough to care for the oppressors.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#21. The black people's struggle has vanquished racism. It was God who created colour. Today Obama, a son of Kenya, a son of Africa, has made it in the United States of America.

Muammar Al-Gaddafi

#22. Historian Larry Hise notes in his book Pro-Slavery that ministers 'wrote almost half of all defenses of slavery published in America.' He listed 275 men of the cloth who used the Bible to prove that white people were entitled to own black people as work animals.

James A. Haught

#23. In the 21st century, white America got a wake-up call after 9/11/01. White America and the western world came to realize that people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just 'disappeared' as the Great White West kept on its merry way of ignoring black concerns.

Jeremiah Wright

#24. In black America there's such a thing as passing, the black people who are light skinned and they will pass for white.

Juan Williams

#25. There haven't been fundamental structural changes in America. There's been a very important symbolic change and that is the election of Barack Obama. But the only black people who truly live in a post-racial world in America all live in a very nice house on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Henry Louis Gates

#26. They say African Americans. I say black people. I've only been to Africa once. I've been in America all my life!

Herman Cain

#27. Then too, you're constantly being bumped against by those of poor vision. Or again, you doubt if you really exist. You wonder whether you aren't simply a phantom in other people's minds. Say, a figure in a nightmare which the sleeper tries with all his strength to destroy.

Ralph Ellison

#28. America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Pat Buchanan

#29. They're people who probably imagine that they would have had a better time in the past. I wouldn't imagine you'd encounter a lot of black people saying 'Oh, the '50s, that was when America was great.' It's very dangerous because the past was imperfect, and you can't go back anyway.

Christine Jennings

#30. At screenings for 'Black in America,' I've heard people say, 'Well you know, I never thought you were black until you did Katrina, and then I thought you were black.'

Soledad O'Brien

#31. As a result of America's efforts to realize the ideals of equality and freedom, blacks in America are now the freest and richest black people anywhere on the face of the earth including all of the nations that are ruled by blacks.

David Horowitz

#32. I remember reading article about the woman in that Oakland neighborhood who lost all her children to violence. I wondered why'd she keep living there after the first one was killed. Didn't she care about the others?
Today, I zoomed out and wondered why I'm still in America.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#33. The United States is like one big jail for Black people, because we're locked into a mentality and a mindset that limits our potential. It has us against us.

Chuck D

#34. Here's the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

Anonymous

#35. When you're marginalized, there are no "them people," if we're all on the outskirts of the same margin.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#36. No other group in America has so had their identity socialized out of existence as have black women ... When black people are talked about the focus tends to be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.

Bell Hooks

#37. Where the really sincere white people have got to do their 'proving' of themselves is not among the black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America's racism really is - and that's in their own home communities.

Malcolm X

#38. I come from the best era of film I believe; when people were taking chances on films. It's time for us to bring more truth to the story and not necessarily carry a torch for every Black person in America; just tell a story, and a good one too.

Romany Malco

#39. On the outside, America looks like this great melting pot, but on the inside, there's this segregation in American cinema. Why does a Latino film have to be for Latinos? Why is a black film just for black people? Why?

Gurinder Chadha

#40. This is a career about images. It's celluloid; they last for ever. I'm a black woman from America. My people were slaves in America, and even though we're free on paper and in law, I'm not going to allow you to enslave me on film, in celluloid, for all to see.

Angela Bassett

#41. 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

#42. Whatever else the election of Barack Obama represented - some have called it redemption, others have called it the triumph of style over substance - it was the ultimate victory for people who believe that black political gains are of utmost importance to black progress in America.

Jason L. Riley

#43. It's a great day in America when white people, black people and Latinos can all come together and pick on another minority.

George Lopez

#44. 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

#45. I do not admit ... that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America, or the black people of Australia ... by the fact that a stronger race, a higher grade race ... has come in and taken its place.

Winston Churchill

#46. Audiences want great story telling; it's why white people watch my show 'Black in America.' It's why black people watch 'Latina in America.' All of that is statistically shown and proven but it was because it was good story telling about people who were outsiders.

Soledad O'Brien

#47. In 1957, when I was in second grade, black children integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. We watched it on TV. All of us watched it. I don't mean Mama and Daddy and Rocky. I mean all the colored people in America watched it, together, with one set of eyes.

Henry Louis Gates

#48. Living in a state of terror was new to many white people in America, but black people have been living in a state of terror in this country for more than 400 years.

Maya Angelou

#49. I could never live with you; not 'cause I'm racist or nothing. It's just 'cause as a black man in America, I need to have someone I can come home and complain about white people to. And that just don't work with my white wife.

J. B. Smoove

#50. Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.

Henry Louis Gates

#51. A lot of wars are fought between black and whites daily in America.But if it's something I want to be with, the people who started it were black, I wouldn't not get in it.

Muhammad Ali

#52. The Black church is extremely important in Black America. I think most Americans themselves believe in a divine power, in a god, and I'm sure that that number increases with Black people.

Harry Lennix

#53. America is the civilization of people engaged in transforming themselves. In the past, the stars of the performance were the pioneer and the immigrant. Today, it is youth and the Black.

Harold Rosenberg

#54. White folks, no matter how well-meaning or open-minded, have no true idea what it's like to be black in America. That's not a slam against white people or an accusation of latent bigotry. But the fact is that we all live in an Anglo-dominated society.

John Ridley

#55. America's put American Black Folks in such a bad position, empty plates and glasses now get us full.

Darnell Lamont Walker

#56. You look at my audience, and it proves what Congress thinks America is, is wrong. I get people across the political spectrum. Parents and kids come and they're all punked out, and there are these other guys in John Deere caps.

Lewis Black

#57. We who follow the Honorable Elijah Muhammad feel that when you try and pass integration laws here in America, forcing white people to pretend that they are accepting black people, what you are doing is making white people act in a hypocritical way.

Malcolm X

#58. Segmentation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.

Coretta Scott King

#59. It's ironic when black non-Muslims say Islam is not a religion that uplifts black people when two of the most celebrated black heroes in recent history were both Muslim; Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali.

Habeeb Akande

#60. You go through the Civil Rights struggle, everybody knew the songs - 'We shall overcome.' Everybody would sing it. Music helped us. James Brown, 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud.' They helped black people figure out how to navigate what was a very treacherous place in America for them.

Geoffrey Canada

#61. It was the Michael Jordan/Nike phenomenon that really let people see that athletes were OK, and black athletes were OK. Defying a previous wisdom - not only that black athletes wouldn't sell in white America, but that the NBA as a predominantly black sport could not sell in white America.

David Stern

#62. During the 19th-century struggle for women's rights in America, many saw a competition between rights for black people and those for women.

Karen DeCrow

#63. This world that we live in would be perfect if there were less prejudice and people who think they are better than others.

Werley Nortreus

#64. Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity.

Cornel West

#65. I always tell young people in particular, "Do not say that nothing's changed when it comes to race in America unless you lived through being a black man in the 1950s, or '60s, or '70s."

Barack Obama