Top 100 Negro's Quotes
#1. There are many films in which minority groups are caricatured to the point where truth is all together lost. There are many more films, good in general, but untrue in their presentation of the Negro's life as totally divorced from the Caucasian's or the Caucasian's from the Negro.
John Garfield
#2. The Negro does not want love. He wants justice ... I believe it would be better for the Negro's soul to be seared with hate than dwarfed by self-abasement.
E. Franklin Frazier
#3. The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#4. The Negro's economic problem was compounded by the emergence and growth of automation. Since discrimination and lack of education confined him to unskilled and semi-skilled labor, the Negro was and remains the first to suffer in these days of great technological development.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#5. The negro's story may have started in this country with degradation, but triumph and prosperity would be his one day.
Colson Whitehead
#6. It is pretty well settled that the city is the Negro's great contribution to civilization, for it was in Africa where the first cities grew up.
E. Haldeman-Julius
#7. as well as Biblically. First, the Negro's black skin is not the mark of Cain as so many, even some preachers, claim. If that were true, that would make the Negro our distant cousin, distant but still part of the same family. They are not part of the human race, distant or otherwise. Don't
Michael Edwin Q.
#8. But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target
Richard Wright
#9. The black artist is dangerous. Black art controls the 'Negro's' reality, negates negative influences, and creates positive images.
Sonia Sanchez
#10. Newspapers play up as sensational every attempt by a Negro to rape a white woman. Yet this white rape of Negro women is apparently a different matter. But it is rape nonetheless, and practiced on a scale that dwarfs the Negro's defaults. The
John Howard Griffin
#11. But the Negro's experience of the white world cannot possibly create in him any respect for the standards by which the white world claims to live.
James Baldwin
#12. It is a measure of the Negro's circumstance that, in America, the smallest things usually take him so very long, and that, by the time he wins them, they are no longer little things: they are miracles.
Murray Kempton
#13. Soon now, as the Negro awakens a little more and sees the vise that he's in, sees the bag that he's in, sees the real game that he's in, then the Negro's going to develop a new tactic.
Malcolm X
#14. There's nothing more sickening to me than a low-grade white man who'll take advantage of a Negro's ignorance. Don't fool yourselves - it's all adding up and one of these days we're going to pay the bill for it. I hope it's not in you children's time.
Harper Lee
#16. The Negro's so-called 'revolt' is merely an asking to be accepted into the existing system!
Malcolm X
#17. Every race man and woman should cast aside their skepticism regarding the Negro's ability as a motion picture star.
Oscar Micheaux
#18. But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There's a song that says, "the time ain't long." That song is right. Something has got to change in America-and change soon. We must help that change to come.
Langston Hughes
#19. (Harry Reid) was wowed by Obama's oratorical gifts and believed that the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama - a 'light-skinned' African American 'with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.
Harry Reid
#20. I have a theory. An audience doesn't need to get wrapped up in blackness every time they see a Negro actor. And a movie doesn't have to be about race just because there's a Negro in it.
Jim Brown
#21. So Ham's wife that was preserved on the Ark was a Negro of the seed of Cain and there was a priestly purpose in it, that the Devil would have a representation as well as God.
Warren Jeffs
#22. Al Gore's Negro tolerance level has never been too high. I've never known him to have more than one black person around him at any given time.
Cynthia McKinney
#23. Because I knew that racist Negro Archetypes, like Bebe's Kids, don't die. They multiply.
Paul Beatty
#24. I knew from experience at the Negro Ensemble Company that it wasn't until there was a place controlled by black artists ... that Pulitzer Prize-winning work like 'Ceremonies in Dark Old Men' and 'A Soldier's Play' came to fruition.
Michael Schultz
#25. Where Chicago's vast and growing Negro population shifted and moved and stretched its great limbs ominously, reaching out and out in protest and overflowing the bounds that irked it. Her serene face and her quiet manner, her bland interest and friendly look protected her.
Edna Ferber
#26. The word [jazz] never lost its association with those New Orleans bordellos. In the 1920s I used to try to convince Fletcher Henderson that we ought to call what we were doing 'Negro music'. But it's too late for that now.
Duke Ellington
#27. I would love to see as many of the black players as possible in today's Major League Baseball make every effort to go to the Negro Leagues Museum and get a first-hand view of how it all started.
Ferguson Jenkins
#28. The jazz band's chief stimulus, of course, was the rise of the negro 'blues' and their exploitation by the negro song-writer, W. C. Handy.
Bix Beiderbecke
#29. Very early in life, it seemed to me that there was a relationship between the problems of the Negro people in America and the Jewish people in Russia, and that the Jewish people's problems were worse than ours.
Langston Hughes
#30. My mother introduced me to more academic-minded writers, Cornel West and Skip Gates. In her library, I came across, when I was very young, Harold Cruse's 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,' which is like a bible of Negro intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Amiri Baraka.
Rashid Johnson
#31. If I could write a story that would do for the Indian one-hundredth part what 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' did for the Negro, I would be thankful the rest of my life.
Helen Hunt Jackson
#32. It's hard for anyone intelligent to be nonviolent. Everything in the universe does something when you start playing with his life, except the American Negro. He lays down and says, 'Beat me, daddy.'
Malcolm X
#33. We're ready for a real black President - someone like Jay-Z. Obama's fine, just not all black. He's our gateway Negro.
Christopher Titus
#34. Yet when his classmates put their blades to a colored cadaver, they did more for the cause of colored advancement than the most high-minded abolitionist. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal.
Colson Whitehead
#35. It's almost like that's the definition of being American: You love becoming Irish for a day, or becoming Italian ... Or becoming a Negro for four years.
Josh Alan Friedman
#36. Through the years I have received my share of recognition for efforts in the fields of sports, the arts, the struggle for full citizenship for the Negro people, labor's rights and the fight for peace.
Paul Robeson
#37. We've gone through the names - Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that's an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black?
Spike Lee
#38. The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights.
Jesse Helms
#39. having been jostled by a nautical-looking negro who had come from one of the queer dark courts on the precipitous hillside which formed a short cut from the waterfront to the deceased's home
H.P. Lovecraft
#40. Making love to a Negro isn't frightening; sleeping with him is. Sleep is complete surrender. It's more than nude; it's naked. Anything can happen during the night, when reason sleeps.
Dany Laferriere
#41. The World's Fair audience tended to think of the machine as unqualifiedly good, strong, stupid and obedient. They thought of it as a giant slave, an untiring steel Negro, controlled by Reason in a world of infinite resources.
Robert Hughes
#42. We hear often of the distress of the negro servants, on the loss of a kind master; and with good reason, for no creature on God's earth is left more utterly unprotected and desolate than the slave in these circumstances.
Harriet Beecher Stowe
#43. The background of the Negro culture is voodoo and magic; and the purposes the magic are control and power over God, man, nature and society. Voodoo and magic was the religion and life of America's Negro.
R.J. Rushdoony
#44. When the U.S. Government shows a proper appreciation of the services of the Negro who has never failed it in every crisis of its history to do his whole duty, to shed his blood freely in its behalf ... then, and not till then, will I be heard.
Francis James Grimke
#45. Well, all he did was kill a Negro," I said. "I guess that's only a misdemeanor.
Raymond Chandler
#46. It might be because he knows in his heart that very few people in Maycomb really believed his and Mayella's yarns. He thought he'd be a hero, but all he got for his pain was ... was, okay, we'll convict this Negro but get back to your dump.
Harper Lee
#47. If you want to honor me, give some young boy or girl who's coming along trying to create arts and write and compose and sing and act and paint and dance and make something out of the beauties of the Negro race-give that child some help.
Langston Hughes
#48. I am a colored woman or a Negro woman. Either one is OK. People dislike those words now. Today these use this term African American. It wouldn't occur to me to use that. I prefer to think of myself as an American, that's all!
Annie Elizabeth Delany
#49. I don't try to make sense of suffering. I try to make sense of life...I try each day to see God's will...I console myself with the old Negro spiritual, 'Sooner will be done the troubles of this world. I'm going home to live with God.
Thea Bowman
#50. Well, Dill, after all he's just a Negro." "I don't care one speck. It ain't right, somehow it ain't right to do 'em that way. Hasn't anybody got any business talkin' like that - it just makes me sick." "That's
Harper Lee
#51. But I was very disappointed that I didn't get a chance to go overseas with that group, might not have gotten back but I wanted very much to go because there's not much of a record of the exploits of the first Negro fighter group.
Gordon Parks
#52. I came into my teens unaware that most Americans, blacks as well as whites, were ignorant of the main facts of Negro history. And so it was the facts of other histories that I found most intriguing. I fell into a U.S. history major by chance late in my second year at Fisk University.
David Levering Lewis
#53. It was argued that the Negro was inferior by nature because of Noah's curse upon the children of Ham ... The greatest blasphemy of the whole ugly process was that the white man ended up making God his partner in the exploitation of the Negro.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#54. It has come as a great revelation to me," I wrote her, "that abolition is different from the desire for racial equality. Color prejudice is at the bottom of everything. If it's not fixed, the plight of the Negro will continue long after abolition.
Sue Monk Kidd
#55. Mark Twain married the daughter of one of New York State's leading Abolitionists, Jervis Langdon, who helped Frederick Douglass who became the great Negro leader to escape from slavery.
Hal Holbrook
#56. With my childhood, it's a wonder I'm not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.
Abraham Maslow
#57. He adds, wistfully, "I don't suppose you have syphilis, do you?"
"No."
"Pity. There's a study starting in Alabama that would have paid for all your medical care if you did. Although you'd have to be a Negro."
"I'm not that, either."
"Too bad." The doctor shrugs.
Lauren Beukes
#58. There is a magnificent new militancy within the Negro community all across this nation. And I welcome this as a marvelous development. The Negro of America is saying he's determined to be free and he is militant enough to stand up.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#59. In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.
Norman Mailer
#60. She isn't stupid. She's intelligent enough in a purely feminine way. Eighteenth-century France would have been a marvellous setting for her, or the old South if she hadn't made the mistake of being born a Negro.
Nella Larsen
#61. Will you for God's sake get off that subject? Julian said. When he got on a bus by himself, he made it a point to sit down beside a Negro, in reparation as it were for his mother's sins.
Flannery O'Connor
#62. Our fellow Negro citizens could be summed up in something Tessie said after watching Sidney Poitier's performance in To Sir with Love, which opened a month before the riots. She said, You see, they can speak perfectly normal if they want.
Jeffrey Eugenides
#63. How ironic that the Negro, who more than any other people can claim America's culture as his own, is being persecuted and repressed; that the Negro, who has exemplified the humanities in his very existence, is being rewarded with inhumanity.
Sonny Rollins
#64. Wilmington, Del. (AP) June 14, 1966 - A fire that destroyed the city's oldest Negro church has led to the discovery of a wild slave narrative that highlights a little-known era of American history. The First United
James McBride
#65. I proudly love being a Negro woman
it's so involved and interesting.
Anne Spencer
#66. Biologically speaking the Afro-Asiatic block is in the ascendancy - always remember that both Negro and White are minority groups - the largest race is the Mongoloid group.
William S. Burroughs
#67. Slavery is not the only question which comes up in this controversy. There is a far more important one to you, and that is, what shall be done with the free negro?
Stephen Douglas
#68. Therefore, the Negro nation are, as a rule, submissive to slavery, because [Negroes] have little [that is essentially] human and have attributes that are quite similar to those of dumb animals, as we have stated.
Ibn Khaldun
#69. No race has the last word on culture and on civilization. You do not know what the black man is capable of; you do not know what he is thinking and therefore you do not know what the oppressed and suppressed Negro, by virtue of his condition and circumstance, may give to the world as a surprise.
Marcus Garvey
#70. A Negro who does not vote is ungrateful to those who have already died in the fight for freedom ... Any person who does not vote is failing to serve the cause of freedom - his own freedom, his people's freedom, and his country's freedom.
Constance Baker Motley
#71. The actual sight of a first-class house that a Negro has built is ten times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought to build, or perhaps could build.
Booker T. Washington
#72. But why wasn't I born, alas, in an age of Adjectives; why can one no longer write of silver-shedding Tears and moon-tailed Peacocks, of eloquent Death, of the Negro and star-enameled Night?
Logan Pearsall Smith
#73. No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society. They're robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it's the truth. They are a black body with a white brain.
Malcolm X
#74. If a white man falls off a chair drunk, it's just a drunk.
If a Negro does, it's the whole damn Negro race.
Bill Cosby
#75. The American Negro has been entirely brainwashed from ever seeing or thinking of himself, as he should, as a part of the non-white peoples of the world.
Malcolm X
#76. The traitor of other races is generally confined to the mediocre or irresponsible individual, but, unfortunately, the traitors among the Negro race are generally to be found among the men with the highest place in education and society, the fellows who call themselves leaders.
Marcus Garvey
#77. In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces.
Charles Lamb
#78. Besides paid white laborers, there was everywhere a class of white servants bound without wages for a term of years, and a more miserable class of Negro slaves.
Albert Bushnell Hart
#79. It now appears that the negro race is, more than any other, susceptible of rapid civilization. The emancipation is observed, in the islands, to have wrought for the negro a benefit as sudden as when a thermometer is brought out of the shade into the sun. It has given him eyes and ears.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#80. Every argument for Negro suffrage is an argument for women's suffrage.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#81. The Negro cannot win the respect of his oppressor by acquiescing; he merely increases the oppressor's arrogance and contempt.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#82. Do you know what the Negro is? Animal right out of the jungle. Passion. Welfare. Easy life. That's the Negro.
Leander Perez
#83. To be liberated from the stigma of blackness by embracing it is to cease, forever, one's interior argument and collaboration with the authors of one's degradation. It abruptly reduces the white enemy to a contest merely physical, which he can win only physically.
James Baldwin
#84. Of course, the hustler doesn't proclaim his trade to the outside world, for typically he has neither a masochistic urge to be put down nor the reactive hostility to majority opinion that one finds in the flamboyant homosexual or "professional Negro" or "professional Jew" and the like.
Ned Polsky
#85. It was more wonderful than making love with a negro boxer on Mr Singer's billiard table.
Sebastian Faulks
#86. There are no negro problems, or Polish problems, or Jewish problems, or Greek problems, or women's problems, there are HUMAN PROBLEMS.
Jacque Fresco
#87. Given Fanon's subsequent traumatic encounter with the white gaze ('Look, maman, a negro'), it is ironic that it was he and Manville who gazed at the children and could not take their eyes off them. They had never seen a girl with truly red hair, or such a blond boy, and they were fascinated.
David Macey
#88. No man will ever be president of the United States who spells Negro with two g's.
William H. Seward
#89. Profound as race prejudice is against the Negro American, it is not practically as far-reaching as the prejudice against women. For stripping away the sentimentality which makes Mother's Day and Best American Mother Contests, the truth is that women suffer all the effects of a minority.
Pearl S. Buck
#90. 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
#91. For the Afro-American in the 1920's being a 'New Negro' was being 'Modern'. And being an 'New Negro' meant, largely, not being an 'Old Negro', disassociating oneself from the symbols and legacy of slavery - being urbane, assertive militant.
Nathan Huggins
#92. I talked and talked of everything I know about the white man's inhuman treatment of the Negro.
Rosa Parks
#93. It's like the Negro in America seeing the white man win all the time.
He's a professional gambler; he has all the cards and the odds stacked on his side, and he has always dealt to our people from the bottom of the deck.
Malcolm X
#94. I'm a field Negro. The masses are the field Negroes. When they see this man's house on fire, you don't hear these little Negroes talking about 'our government is in trouble'. They say, 'The government is in trouble.'
Malcolm X
#95. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal. On
Colson Whitehead
#96. A white person listens to my act and he laughs and he thinks, 'Yeah, that's the way I see it too.' Okay. He's white. I'm Negro. And we both see things the same way. That must mean that we are alike ... So I figure I'm doing as much for good race relations as the next guy.
Bill Cosby
#97. The warm bittersweet smell of clean Negro welcomed us as we entered the churchyard-Hearts of Love hairdressing mingled with asafoetida, snuff, Hoyt's Cologne, Brown's Mule, peppermint, and lilac talcum.
Harper Lee
#98. Latinos outnumber Black people now. I'm not too happy about it. Because it's only a matter of time before we lose our month. Soon as they figure it out, they're going to have Latino History Month. All we're going to have is Cinco de Negro.
Alonzo Bodden
#99. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, or Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes.
Harry S. Truman
#100. I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.
Zora Neale Hurston
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