Top 54 Black Struggle Quotes
#1. The fact that we elected Obama was a sign that the black struggle inherent in the blues and so much of the music I have loved can triumph.
Jack White
#2. Every now and then you get a nice Jewish kid who likes black people and they would come in, and it would be a stream of them, and have black friends and really feel the black struggle on the acting tip and it's a reason why all of us are not dying in the movie.
Mike Epps
#3. The female struggle implies the black struggle, it implies the struggle with anti-Semitism, it implies all of the other struggles. That is the only possible way to think about human liberation.
Sally Potter
#4. Revolution is a serious thing, the most serious thing about a revolutionarys life. When one commits oneself to the struggle, it must be for a lifetime.
Angela Davis
#5. Black men struggle with masculinity so much. The idea that we must always be strong really presses us all down - it keeps us from growing.
Donald Glover
#6. I'd like to think that when I sing a song, I can let you know all about the heartbreak, struggle, lies and kicks in the ass I've gotten over the years for being black and everything else, without actually saying a word about it.
Ray Charles
#7. As another has well said, 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.
Carter G. Woodson
#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. There had always been black people in and out of our house, and from the outset I had been taught that for them life was defined by struggle and filled with injustice.
Carl Bernstein
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. O wretched state! O bosom black as death! O limed soul that, struggling to be free, art more engaged! Help, angels! Make assay! Bow, stubborn knees! and, heart with strings of steel, be soft as sinews of the new-born babe!
William Shakespeare
#13. My boy, you are by blood, by appearance, by education, and by tastes a white man. Now, why do you want to throw your life away amidst the poverty and ignorance, in the hopeless struggle, of the black people of the United States?
James Weldon Johnson
#14. At this time I'd like to say a few words especially to my sisters: SISTERS. BLACK PEOPLE WILL NEVER BE FREE UNLESS BLACK WOMEN PARTICIPATE IN EVERY ASPECT OF OUR STRUGGLE, ON EVERY LEVEL OF OUR STRUGGLE.
Assata Shakur
#15. A black person grows up in this country - and in many places - knowing that racism will be as familiar as salt to the tongue. Also, it can be as dangerous as too much salt. I think that you must struggle for betterment for yourself and for everyone.
Maya Angelou
#16. There were days I could barely struggle into a size 46 or 48, months of larges and XXLs, and endless rounds of leggings with the elastic at the waist stretched to its limit and beyond - topped with the fashion equivalent of a tea cozy. And always black, because I was in mourning for my slimmer self.
Carrie Fisher
#17. When you're in a black group, you have to keep in mind you're not black. You just have to be sensitive. We have to be appreciative that the black nationalist struggle is a nationalist struggle.
Yuri Kochiyama
#18. It is a struggle; for though the black man fights passively, he nevertheless fights; and his passive resistance is more effective at present than active resistance could possibly be. He bears the fury of the storm as does the willow tree.
James Weldon Johnson
#19. As a black woman, my politics and political affiliation are bound up with and flow from participation in my people's struggle for liberation, and with the fight of oppressed people all over the world against American imperialism.
Angela Davis
#20. 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
#21. I am a Black Feminist. I mean I recognize that my power as well as my primary oppressions come as a result of my blackness as well as my womaness, and therefore my struggles on both of these fronts are inseparable.
Audre Lorde
#22. My father's voice had nevertheless remained untainted, inspiring, rebuking, granting or withholding approval. 'You do not work hard enough, Barry. You must help in your people's struggle. Wake up, black man!
Barack Obama
#23. Freedom is a struggle, and we do it together. Not only together as black citizens, but black and white together.
Andrew Young
#24. Being called Black in America is the struggle to keep us moving and breathing over bloody water. Being a Nig**r or [Ni**a] without the context of history is like drowning in bloody water, dragging down those yet knowing to swim.
Chuck D
#25. I write, as far as I can tell, because writing is a black sheep sibling of prayer, an urgent struggle against a bad connection, intent, hopeful, innocent, never quite good enough.
Kirk Wilson
#26. My struggle has allowed me to transcend that sense of shame and stigma identified with my being a Black gay man. Having come through the fire, they can't touch me.
Marlon Riggs
#27. My hair covers my scarring.'
'But we've agreed that no one notices your scarring once they're around you. You woo them like a big, fat hairy black spider, and no matter how much they struggle they're helpless.
Anne Stuart
#28. There are expectations in how you play your character as a black woman, to be sassy and the same kind of feel, as if there are no quirky black women. I struggle with those things constantly, trying to add dimension to my work, and that's the goal, too.
Nicole Beharie
#29. 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
#30. The institutionalization of Black Studies, Feminist Studies, all of these things, led to a sense that the struggle was over for a lot of people and that one did not have to continue the personal consciousness-raising and changing of one's viewpoint.
Bell Hooks
#31. Believing in things you cannot see Even with my trembling arms I want to protect someone dear to me The place my thought that proggressed up to now struggle on to To see hopes Even in a black, confined world
Kanon Wakeshima
#32. We cannot assume that people by virtue of the fact that they are black are going to associate themselves with progressive political struggles. We need to divest ourselves the kinds of strategies that assume that black unity black political unity is possible.
Angela Davis
#33. The black woman had had to struggle against being a person of great strength.
Dorothy Height
#34. We black men have a hard enough time in our own struggle for justice, and already have enough enemies as it is, to make the drastic mistake of attacking each other and adding more weight to an already unbearable load.
Malcolm X
#35. Being Black and poor is, I think, radically different from being anything else and poor. Poor, to most Blacks, is a state of mind. Those who accept it are poor; those who struggle are middle class.
Nikki Giovanni
#36. 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
#37. Indra believed that the birth of each of her sons had been accompanied by a sign... With Sarva, overnight her cascading black hair showed a thick clutch of grey. He was the child she would struggle most with.
Rohini Mohan
#38. The enormous success of 2009's 'The Blind Side,' in which Sandra Bullock makes a black teenager one of the family, demonstrates that America isn't post-racial. It is thoroughly mired in race - the myths that surround it, the guilt it inspires, the discomfort it causes, the struggle to transcend it.
Wesley Morris
#39. The legacies that parents and church and teachers left to my generation of Black children were priceless but not material: a living faith reflected in daily service, the discipline of hard work and stick-to-itiveness, and a capacity to struggle in the face of adversity.
Marian Wright Edelman
#40. Reggae music don't really focus on one thing, you know. If reggae music is speaking about the struggle of people, and the suffering, it don't mean black people. It mean people in general.
Burning Spear
#41. Today masses of black women in the U.S. refuse to acknowledge that they have much to gain by feminist struggle. They fear feminism. They have stood in place so long that they are afraid to move. They fear change. They fear losing what little they have.
Bell Hooks
#42. Literature is one of the few areas left where black and white feel some identity of purpose; we all struggle under censorship.
Nadine Gordimer
#43. It is crucial for the future of the Black liberation struggle that we remain ever mindful that ours is a shared struggle, that we are each other's fate.
Bell Hooks
#45. I think it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the black middle class tends to rely on a kind of imagined struggle that gets projected into commodities like kente cloth for example on the one hand and images like the Million Man March.
Angela Davis
#46. In Poland a man must be one thing: white or black, here or there, with us or against us
clearly, openly, without hesitations ... We lack the liberal, democratic tradition rich in all its gradations. We have instead the tradition of struggle: the extreme situation, the final gesture.
Ryszard Kapuscinski
#47. My car is always black. I really struggle with red cars. I don't want to attract too much cop attention.
Natasha Lyonne
#48. These superhero and mythical stories have, in many cases, replaced Biblical stories as vehicles for communal myths, but they are hardly any better than ancient magical adventures tinged with mythical archetypes and the decidedly unnuanced black-and-white struggle between good and evil.
Gudjon Bergmann
#49. Black History Month should be celebrated everyday. It's a month that's kind of sad to me, because I am reminded of the struggles that people before us had to go through for us to be able to live comfortably today.
Tamara James
#50. But it is these deaths - the killings in Ferguson and Beavercreek and beyond - that commemorate the unfinished, perhaps unending, struggle to assert black humanity in a country built on its denial.
Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts
#51. I lie in an early bed thinking late thoughts, waiting for the black to replace my blue. I do not struggle in your web because it was my aim to get caught. But daddy long legs I feel that I'm finally growing weary of waiting to be consumed by you.
Fiona Apple
#52. It's a struggle for every young Black man. You know how it is, only God can judge us.
Tupac Shakur
#53. If Black women stand strong and our commitment is to ending domination I know that I'm supporting Black males, Black children male and female Black elderly because the bottom line is the struggle to end domination in all its forms.
Bell Hooks
#54. One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to now there has been no national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghetto.
Stokely Carmichael
