Top 100 Quotes About Negro
#1. 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
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. 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
#7. 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
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. 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
#12. 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
#13. 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
#14. The longer I live and the more I study the question, the more I am convinced that it is not so much the problem of what you will do with Negro, as what the Negro will do with you and your 'civilization'.
Booker T. Washington
#15. In the north we could not hope to keep the worst and poorest servant for a single day in the wretched discomfort in which our negro servants are forced habitually to live.
Fanny Kemble
#16. 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
#17. To my mind, it is the duty of the younger Negro artist, if he accepts any duties at all from outsiders, to change through the force of his art that old whispering 'I want to be white,' hidden in the aspirations of his people, to 'Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!'
Langston Hughes
#18. I proudly love being a Negro woman
it's so involved and interesting.
Anne Spencer
#19. Foreign diplomats could have modeled their conduct on the way the Negro postmen, Pullman porters, and dining car waiters of Roxbury [Massachusetts] acted, striding around as if they were wearing top hats and cutaways.
Malcolm X
#20. In the morning, when she walked to the consulate, carefully watching her sandals on the pavement, she glanced up and saw a Negro wearing a stack of panama hats. Maybe twelve. She never forgot the bandoeon of brims, the perfect stutter of hat.
Craig Raine
#21. It was not an unusual site to see Negro tenant farmers crossing the intersection of Spring and Barbrick on the way to the cotton warehouse
Nancy B. Brewer
#22. 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
#23. And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race.
Carter G. Woodson
#24. The Jewish people and the Negro people both know the meaning of Nordic supremacy. We have both looked into the eyes of terror.
Langston Hughes
#25. 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
#26. I don't want to pass because I can't stand insincerities and shams. I am just as much Negro as any of the others identified with the race.
Fredi Washington
#27. 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
#28. The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#29. Washington, D.C. in 1942 was not the easiest place in the world for a Negro to get along.
Gordon Parks
#30. The deficiency of the negro race is not as a result of the deluge number of bad leaders;rather, its is an outcome of the shortage of young negro intellect ready to lead a revolutionary africa.
Victor Adeagbo
#31. We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too.
Langston Hughes
#32. I grew up watching those blaxploitation movies. Ron O'Neal, Richard Roundtree, Jim Brown, Pam Grier. For the first time, I saw 'The Negro' get one over on 'The Man.'
Samuel L. Jackson
#33. The Negro has no room to make any substantial compromises because his store of advantages is too small. He must press unrelentingly for quality, integrated education or his whole drive for freedom will be undermined by the absence of a most vital and indispensable element - learning.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#34. The negro has within him immense power for self-uplifting, but for years it will be necessary to guide and stimulate him.
Booker T. Washington
#35. The Negro pays for what he wants and begs for what he needs.
Kelly Miller
#36. 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
#37. Opens up a whole new view of Beckett. The strong mutual attraction between Beckett and Cunard may help explain the leftist political views he expressed both in these superb and long-neglected translations for Negro and elsewhere in his work.
Barney Rosset
#38. Negro servants have been smuggling odds and ends out of white homes for generations, and white people have been delighted to have them do it, because it has assuaged a dim guilt and testified to the intrinsic superiority of white people.
James A. Baldwin
#39. 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
#40. Why should not Africa give to the world its Black Rockefeller, Rothschild and Henry Ford? Now is the opportunity. Now is the chance for every Negro to make every effort toward a commercial, industrial standard that will make us comparable with the successful business men of other races.
Marcus Garvey
#41. I am determined to get every Negro in the state of Mississippi registered.
Fannie Lou Hamer
#42. If I can do one hundredth part for the Indian that Mrs. Stowe did for the Negro, I will be thankful.
Helen Hunt Jackson
#43. The North has no interest in the particular Negro, but talks of justice for the whole. The South has not interest, and pretends none, in the mass of Negroes but is very much concerned about the individual.
Zora Neale Hurston
#44. I felt leap within me pride that I was colored; and I began to form wild dreams of bringing glory and honor to the Negro race.
James Weldon Johnson
#45. The integration of the Negro into American society is one of the most exciting challenges to self-development and self-mastery that any nation of people ever faced.
Margaret Halsey
#46. 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
#47. Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the political leaders consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#48. One ever feels his twoness,
an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose strenth alone keeps it from being torn asunder.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#49. 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
#50. The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.
Charles Hamilton Houston
#51. All peoples are struggling to blast a way through the industrial monopoly of races and nations, but the Negro as a whole has failed to grasp its true significance and seems to delight in filling only that place created for him by the white man.
Marcus Garvey
#52. The more noisy Negro leaders, by depicting all whites as natural and implacable enemies to their race, have done it a great disservice. Large numbers of whites who were formerly very
friendly to it, and willing to go to great lengths to help it, are now resentful and suspicious.
H.L. Mencken
#53. The Younger Generation comes, bringing its gifts. They are the first fruits of the Negro Renaissance. Youth speaks, and the voice of the New Negro is heard.
Alain LeRoy Locke
#55. 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
#56. I feel that the time is always right to do what is right. Where progress for the Negro in America is concerned, there is a tragic misconception of time among whites. They seem to cherish a strange, irrational notion that something in the very flow of time will cure all ills.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#57. If the Negro is not careful he will drink in all the poison of modern civilization and die from the effects of it.
Marcus Garvey
#58. This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.
Langston Hughes
#59. Because of the generation in which I came into the world, there were expectations. Of course there were expectations. It was something having to do with being a respectable Negro woman who would make the people in Baltimore proud.
Anna Deavere Smith
#60. and it was this that made her frown, that the only time a Negro was allowed to be treated with grandeur was when he or she wasn't even alive to appreciate it.
Ray Celestin
#61. Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro.
Henry Louis Gates
#62. The drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his worth.
Mary McLeod Bethune
#63. 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
#64. Would America have been America without her Negro people?
W.E.B. Du Bois
#65. I was a victim of a stereotype. There were only two of us Negro kids in the whole class, and our English teacher was always stressing the importance of rhythm in poetry. Well, everybody knows - except us - that all Negroes have rhythms, so they elected me class poet.
Langston Hughes
#66. It is the white man who creates the Negro. But it is the negro who creates negritude.
Frantz Fanon
#67. In the treatment of poverty nationally, one fact stands out: there are twice as many white poor as Negro poor in the United States. Therefore I will not dwell on the experiences of poverty that derive from racial discrimination, but will discuss the poverty that affects white and Negro alike.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#68. The Negro people of America ... have cut our forests, tilled our fields, built our railroads, fought our battles, and in all of their trials they have manifested a simple faith, a grateful heart, a cheerful spirit, and an undivided loyalty .
Mordecai Wyatt Johnson
#69. Taking it all in all and after all, negro life in Washington is a promise rather than a fulfillment. But it is worthy of note for the really excellent things which are promised
Paul Laurence Dunbar
#70. 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
#71. One of the most beautiful things that recruited me to join the LaRouche movement is its emphasis on Classical singing and composition, especially with the Negro Spirituals, adding a new depth of profundity to songs I had sang while growing up.
Kesha Rogers
#72. 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
#73. But if the Negro is so distinctly inferior, it is a strange thing to me that it takes such tremendous effort on the part of the white man to make him realize it, and to keep him in the same place into which inferior men naturally fall.
James Weldon Johnson
#74. 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
#75. I am not merely satisfied in making money for myself, for I am endeavoring to provide employment for hundreds of women of my race ... I want to say to every Negro woman present, don't sit down and wait for the opportunities to come. Get up and make them!
Madam C. J. Walker
#76. The White man pays Reverend Martin Luther King so that Martin Luther King can keep the Negro defenseless.
Malcolm X
#77. By nonviolent resistance, the Negro can also enlist all men of good will in his struggle for equality.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#78. I don't think that I or any other Negro, as an American citizen, should have to ask for anything that is rightfully his. We are demanding that we just be given the things that are rightfully ours and that we're not looking for anything else.
Jackie Robinson
#79. The Negro loves America enough to criticize her fundamentally. Most white Americans simply can't be bothered.
John Oliver Killens
#80. The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.
Carter G. Woodson
#81. ...internalized the Negro theorem of needing to be twice as good to get half as far.
Margot Lee Shetterly
#82. Through nonviolent resistance the Negro will be able to rise to the noble height of opposing the unjust system while loving the perpetrators of the system.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#83. The Southern Negro will not tell the white man the truth. He long ago learned that if he speaks a truth unpleasing to the white, the white will make life miserable for him. The
John Howard Griffin
#84. White people ... have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this
which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never
the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.
James Baldwin
#86. To have built up a new organization, which was not purely political, among Negroes in America was a wonderful feat, for the Negro politician does not allow any other kind of organization within his race to thrive.
Marcus Garvey
#87. When the Negro finds the courage to be free, he faces dogs and guns and clubs and fire hoses totally unafraid, and the white men with those dogs, guns, clubs and fire hoses see that the Negro they have traditionally called "boy" has become a man.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#89. It is not only poverty that torments the Negro; it is the fact of poverty amid plenty. It is a misery generated by the gulf between the affluence he sees in the mass media and the deprivation he experiences in his everyday life.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#90. I feel myself the inheritor of a great background of people. Just who, precisely, they were, I have never known. I might be part Negro, might be part Jew, part Muslim, part Irish. So I can't afford to be supercilious about any group of people because I may be that people.
James A. Michener
#91. Any musical person who has never heard a Negro congregation under the spell of religious fervor sing these old songs has missed one of the most thrilling emotions which the human heart may experience.
James Weldon Johnson
#92. [W]e have always resented the natural inclination of most white people to demand spirituals the moment it is known that a Negro is about to sing. So often the request has seemed to savor of the feeling that we could do this and this alone.
Countee Cullen
#93. White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this - which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never - the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed. People
James Baldwin
#94. It may be well to repeat here the saying that old men talk of what they have done, young men of what they are doing, and fools of what they expect to do. The Negro race has a rather large share of the last mentioned class.
Carter G. Woodson
#95. 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
#96. In South Carolina, I had been an African. In Nova Scotia, I had become known as a Loyalist, or a Negro, or both. And now, finally back in Africa, I was seen as a Nova Scotian, and in some respects thought of myself that way too.
Lawrence Hill
#97. The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerance. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not enthusiastic acceptance.
Maya Angelou
#98. 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
#99. In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal. On
Colson Whitehead
#100. I was learning that just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.
Dick Gregory
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