Top 100 Quotes About African Americans
#1. When you do a film, you know you're shooting for 6 or 9 weeks, you've got your cast and crew. Overall, no one can just pull the plug and say, 'This isn't working.' There's just no security on television, especially for African Americans. It's a tough market.
Vivica A. Fox
#2. You done decided you want to go to the dance yet Brenda?" "Didn't I tell you that dances was lame?" "What's lame about them?" "I like mature niggas." "I'm not a nigga." "What are you?" "An African American." "Well I don't like African Americans. I like niggas.
Vincent Morris
#3. Crisis' seems to be too mild a word to describe conditions in countless African-American communities. It is beyond crisis when in the richest nation in the world, African Americans in Harlem live shorter lives than the people of Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations of the world.
Johnnetta B. Cole
#4. You are growing into consciousness, and my wish for you is that you feel no need to constrict yourself to make other people comfortable.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#5. It is impossible for African-Americans not to feel like their government is particularly targeting them.
Rand Paul
#6. I think there is a big difference between expressing the pain and anger that many African Americans and other people of color may feel versus language that I think now crosses the line and goes into hate.
Michael Nutter
#7. Diabetes occurs at twice the rate in the African American community as it does in white Americans.
Xavier Becerra
#8. Really, the potential for, first of all, any college graduate today is enormously good. These are good times for anyone with a college degree today, particularly African Americans. With a college degree today, you really breach the unemployment rate.
Alexis Herman
#9. I think one of the political problems we have in this country is the perspective that all soccer moms think alike, all African-Americans think alike.
Anne Northup
#10. Housing programs designed to help young families and senior citizens purchase homes should be available to people of all races, including African Americans.
Loretta Lynch
#11. [Donald] Trump is going to appeal better to African Americans, Hispanics, and others than previous Republican candidates because he's talking about what they want: a fair chance to have a better life economically.
Jeff Sessions
#12. In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.
John Henrik Clarke
#13. [Hillary] Clinton was able to assemble a winning Democratic coalition out here, beating Sanders among African-Americans, women, among women, and voters from union households, so, unions, women, African-Americans.
Chris Matthews
#14. We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.
Yvette Clarke
#15. It's just cheaper to be White in America than it is to be Black, because of educational advances, because of the police incidents, because of the poverty we grow up in as African-Americans. So, it's just cheaper in this country if you're born a Caucasian than being born a Black person.
Warren Ballentine
#16. A report in 2000 observed that among youth who have never been sent to a juvenile prison before, African Americans were more than six times as likely as whites to be sentenced to prison for identical crimes.
Michelle Alexander
#17. You can turn away the Mexicans, the African-Americans, the teenagers and other suspect groups, but there's no fence high enough to keep out the repo man.
Barbara Ehrenreich
#18. The one public system in which America goes out of its way to provide services to African-Americans is prison.
Nicholas Kristof
#19. African Americans make up about 13 percent of the U.S. population but comprise 32 percent of patients treated for kidney failure, giving them a kidney failure rate that is 4.2 times greater than that of white Americans.
Xavier Becerra
#20. I wanted to show that an African-American artist could make it in this country on a national level in the graphic arts. I want to be a strong role model for my family and for other African Americans.
Jerry Pinkney
#22. During the days of segregation, there was not a place of higher learning for African Americans. They were simply not welcome in many of the traditional schools. And from this backward policy grew the network of historical black colleges and universities.
Michael N. Castle
#23. I'm dying twice as fast
as any other American
between eighteen and thirty-five
This disturbs me,
but I try not to show it in public.
Essex Hemphill
#24. Barack Obama's victories in 2008 and 2012 were dismissed by some of his critics as merely symbolic for African Americans. But there is nothing "mere" about symbols.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#25. I stay connected in my head. I'm spiritually and psychologically connected to African-Americans. They are my people, and that will never change.
Assata Shakur
#26. Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that's chewing up.
Randall Robinson
#28. For people of color - especially African Americans - the idea that racist cops might frame members of their community is no abstract notion, let alone an exercise in irrational conspiracy theorizing. Rather, it speaks to a social reality about which blacks are acutely aware.
Tim Wise
#29. The commitment to literacy was constant on the part of African Americans. And the percentages of literacy by the end of the century, by 1900, basic literacy has galloped ahead. People believed that education, of course, was the turnstile for advancement.
David Levering Lewis
#30. As African-Americans, that's what's being played fast and loose with, our citizenship. When you have the Trayvon Martins and the Michael Browns being shot and killed, it's because, on a certain level, there is a kind of mutability in the understanding of citizenship around the black body.
Claudia Rankine
#31. Like any group that has endured much, African Americans have created a strong and mutually reinforcing sense of group identity. That's not a bad thing in and of itself.
J. C. Watts
#32. The number of African Americans in my profession is woefully small; about two percent of architects in the country are black. I'd like to see more diversity. That's why whenever I'm asked to speak at middle and high schools I always say yes.
Philip Freelon
#33. I grew up in the '50s, a tough time for African Americans. I had friends whose fathers would openly say, 'Just bite your tongu;, don't cause any problems.' My father was not like that. Even in the toughest times racially, if somebody disrespected his family, they were in trouble.
Gregory Hines
#34. I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#35. People of color, particularly African Americans, feel the stigma more keenly. In a race-conscious society, some don't want to be perceived as having yet another deficit.
Bebe Moore Campbell
#36. At its core, black theology is predicated on the assertion that God has a unique relationship with African Americans. God is not a passive bystander in human history but rather an active participant in the struggles of oppressed and dispossessed people.
Melissa V. Harris-Perry
#37. America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.
Marco Rubio
#38. When I got my success, I became decadent for a while. This was 2003 to 2008. I fell for tiramisu really hard. I've become more moderate since, because African-Americans are prone to diabetes.
Jill Scott
#39. The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.
Aberjhani
#40. Further, more African Americans today are under criminal justice supervision - either in prison, on parole or probation - than were enslaved 10 years before the Civil War (Alexander 2012
Merrill Singer
#41. The Afro-American experience is the only real culture that America has. Basically, every American tries to walk, talk, dress and behave like African Americans.
Hugh Masekela
#42. 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
#43. There are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began.
Michelle Alexander
#44. There are those who would keep us slipping back into the darkness of division, into the snake pit of racial hatred, of racial antagonism and of support for symbols of the struggle to keep African-Americans in bondage.
Carol Moseley Braun
#45. It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#46. When will we address the fact that rich, white people think they know what's in the best interest of children of African-Americans and Latinos - no matter what the parent's income or education level.
Karen Lewis
#47. Affirmative action was designed to recognize the uniquely difficult journey of African-Americans. This policy was justifiable and understandable, even to those who came from white cultural groups that had also suffered in socio-economic terms from the Civil War and its aftermath.
Jim Webb
#48. I think what happened during the Great Depression was that African Americans understood that Republicans championed citizenship and voting rights but they became impatient for economic emancipation.
Rand Paul
#49. 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
#50. African-Americans know about racism, but I don't think we really know the causes. I decided it's first of all a family problem.
Bebe Moore Campbell
#51. The separate water foundations, park benches, bathrooms and restaurants of the Jim Crow South startled me. These experiences motivated my lifelong study of the status of African Americans and the sources of improvement in that status.
James Heckman
#52. 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
#53. The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans.
Mary Landrieu
#54. He had met this sort of white man before, earnest and believing what came out of their mouths. The veracity of their words was another matter, but at least they believed them. The southern white man was spat from the loins of the devil and there was no way to forecast his next evil act.
Colson Whitehead
#55. Dealing with pain for surviving on this thirsty concrete
Kjiva
#56. During the Great Depression, African Americans were faced with problems that were not unlike those experienced by the most disadvantaged groups in society. The Great Depression had a leveling effect, and all groups really experienced hard times: poor whites, poor blacks.
William Julius Wilson
#57. I have a very personal interest. I am a Miami-Dade voter. One of the issues is that my vote and so many other votes of women and African Americans in Florida are being discounted or discarded. I want my vote to count.
Patricia Ireland
#58. I saw him enthusiastically greet a hulking big African American (Do they call them African Americans here?).
Brett Kiellerop-Morris
#59. You have been cast into a race in which the wind is always at your face and the hounds are always at your heels. And to varying degrees this is true of all life. The difference is that you do not have the privilege of living in ignorance of this essential fact.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#60. I think anyone that comes to Nigeria has to offer value. What value are you bringing? There are Black Americans here. I think we've moved beyond that Africans vs. African Americans. They may have more issues with us than we do with them.
Mo Abudu
#61. Calling out the supposed 'abuse' of welfare by blacks and other people of color is a time-honored tactic for distracting the general public from actual national issue. It also taps into latent, subconscious racism, which is what right-wing politicians would call a 'win-win.
Justin Simien
#62. Obamanomics, his imposition of European-style socialism, is not working for African-Americans. It is not working for Latinos and African-Americans.
Niger Innis
#63. African American history is really American history because African Americans really helped build this country.
Don Lemon
#64. I would argue that the objective evidence shows that big government is not a friend to African Americans.
Rand Paul
#65. The Tea Party is protecting its millionaire and oil company friends while gutting critical services that they know protect the livelihood of African-Americans, as well as Latinos and other disadvantaged minorities,
Andre Carson
#66. I hope that more [African-Americans] decide to play after seeing the things that I was able to accomplish; not only myself, but other African-American players. Hopefully, they pick up a bat and a ball and go out there and play.
Dontrelle Willis
#67. The notion that religion can actually be something ... attached to progressivism seems so bizarre. But all you have to say is that Abolition wouldn't have happened without it. The way in which African Americans managed to achieve a degree of self-determination was through the church.
Simon Schama
#68. Americans think African writers will write about the exotic, about wildlife, poverty, maybe AIDS. They come to Africa and African books with certain expectations.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#69. Holocaust survivors and their descendants are supposed to hate those who oppressed and killed them and their people. Black people are not. This is how anti-blackness works.
Darnell Lamont Walker
#70. I am very proud to be African. I want to defend African people, and I want to show to the world that African players can be as good as the Europeans and South Americans.
Yaya Toure
#71. Douglas Blackmon, in Slavery by Another Name, describes how tens of thousands of African Americans were arbitrarily arrested during this period, many of them hit with court costs and fines, which had to be worked off in order to secure their release.
Michelle Alexander
#72. I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.
Paul Beatty
#73. Most African Americans, if given a chance, would have chosen to be 'just Americans' ever since the first of us was brought here to Jamestown colony in 1619, a year before the Mayflower landed. But that choice has never been left up to us.
Clarence Page
#74. Most African Americans, especially the men and women from my generation, would accept the nationalist gambit that says only European Americans can be racists, which is an interesting gambit.
Anthony Braxton
#76. Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It's that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated.
Isabel Wilkerson
#77. African Americans are not significantly more likely to use or sell prohibited drugs than whites, but they are made criminals at drastically higher rates for precisely the same conduct.
Michelle Alexander
#78. I'm so tired of the left trying to divide us by race. One of the things I said today in my speech, we're not Indian-Americans, African-Americans, Irish-Americans, rich Americans, poor Americans. We're all Americans.
Bobby Jindal
#79. African Americans constituted only 15 percent of current drug users in 1995, and they constitute roughly the same percentage today.
Michelle Alexander
#80. African-Americans who might have disagreed with candidate Obama's left-of-center politics voted for him in 2008 because electing a candidate with brown skin was too historic an opportunity to miss.
Alveda King
#81. People ask me if I miss the States. I miss African Americans. But not the U.S. government or all the things they put me through. I miss African American culture, our speech, dance and cooking.
Assata Shakur
#82. I was well known to African Americans before Bill Clinton discovered me. He was like Christopher Columbus riding up on something he didn't understand.
Sister Souljah
#83. Dwayne McDuffie was one of my favorite writers. When I was growing up, he was one of the few African Americans working in American comics.
Gene Luen Yang
#84. There are too many African-Americans with too much money for us to have to go to anybody else for anything in terms of schools, in terms of scholarships, in terms of entrepreneurship, in terms of moving us along as a group to that place where we should be as a people.
James Avery
#85. Eight generations of African-Americans are still waiting to achieve their rights - compensation and restitution for the hundreds of years during which they were bought and sold on the market.
Cynthia McKinney
#86. That's one problem I have. Jews when they get successful they will help their people and some of the African-Americans - maybe I'll get in trouble again - they don't want to help anybody,
Donald Sterling
#87. The police killings of unarmed African Americans has got to stop.
Bernie Sanders
#88. America has been very open to immigrants in terms of laws, getting loans - it has been helping immigrants more than it's been helping African Americans in starting a small business. That's key, whether you're starting a restaurant or a laundromat.
Marcus Samuelsson
#89. American high school culture was impenetrable to me, and very cliquey: you had the Hispanics, the African Americans, the surfer guys and the goths and the immigrants. The jocks and the surfers got the girls. By the time I'd got to grips with it, I'd graduated.
Khaled Hosseini
#90. My husband [Julius Tennon] and I started a production company. We've already optioned a book and some scripts to do exactly that, to create more complicated, multi-faceted roles for African-Americans, especially African-American females. I think it's important.
Viola Davis
#91. And there were the warm spaces in the music I loved the most, openings through which I could enter and lay my burdens down. There, behind the groove and riding on the melody, I was complete and free.
Rashod Ollison
#92. I write to breath life back into memory to remind African-Americans of our rich and textured history. I also see myself as a "root," and for me the "fierce winds" include the marginalization-the downright segregation-of literature written by people of color.
Bernice L. McFadden
#93. African Americans were responsible for creating a lot of this beautiful and elaborate ironwork; we weren't just working in the cotton fields.
Philip Freelon
#94. If you're colored, you get the short end of the stick. If you're a woman, you get the short end of the stick. So what do we get for being colored and women?
Sherri L. Smith
#95. Will African-Americans break away from the pack thinking and reject immorality
because that's the reason the family's breaking apart
alcohol, drugs, infidelity. You have to reject that, and it doesn't seem
and I'm broadly speaking here, but a lot of African-Americans won't reject it
Bill O'Reilly
#96. They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.
Thelonious Monk
#97. In 1985, in Batson v. Kentucky, the Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment prohibits prosecutors from discriminating on the basis of race when selecting juries, a ruling hailed as an important safeguard against all-white juries locking up African Americans based on racial biases and stereotypes.
Michelle Alexander
#98. I do think that it's a responsibility when there are so few of us as African Americans to kind of get to that place of success in a positive light. We should take a stance and stand for something and use that platform for positivity.
Misty Copeland
#99. It seems that the Neanderthal DNA that modern Europeans and Asians (and also Native Americans and basically all non-African people) are carrying around is random. This means there are different bits and pieces in different populations, but it doesn't seem to amount to much that's significant.
Elizabeth Kolbert
#100. I am tired with hyphenated Americans! We are not Indian-Americans, or African-Americans.
Bobby Jindal
Famous Authors
Popular Topics
Scroll to Top
