Top 100 Quotes About Negroes
#1. There appears to be a vast amount of confusion on this point, but I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet.
James Baldwin
#2. We forfeit the right to worship God as long as we continue to humiliate negroes ... The hour calls for moral grandeur and spiritual audacity.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#3. 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
#4. Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#5. There are a million Negroes in Mississippi. I think they'll take care of me.
James Meredith
#6. The poor Americans are so busy defending the rights of Hindus in Pakistan, Moslems in India, Jews in Palestine, Koreans in Japan, Italians in Yugoslavia and Hungarians in Czechoslovakia that they simply cannot give a thought to Negroes in the United States.
George Mikes
#7. 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
#8. I took my obligations from white men, not from negroes. When I have to accept negroes as brothers or leave masonry, I shall leave it
Albert Pike
#9. Under the pitiful misapprehension that it would make them "better," these Hill Negroes were breaking their backs trying to imitate white people.
Malcolm X
#10. I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, I was involved in what the Negroes, I mean, blacks were thinking, what they were feeling.
Joe Biden
#11. I can hardly believe that the South and North can live in peace, unless we can get rid of the negroes ... I believe that it would be better to export them all to some fertile country with a good climate, which they could have to themselves.
Abraham Lincoln
#12. Even if my mother had no qualms of conscience concerning ownership of negroes, her sense of duty carried her far beyond the mere supplying of their physical needs, or requiring that they render faithful service.
John Sergeant Wise
#13. I will not take 'but' for an answer. Negroes have been looking at democracy's 'but' too long.
Langston Hughes
#14. I was imprisoned in Missouri in 1854 for preaching the gospel to Negroes, though I was never subjected to violence.
Hiram Rhodes Revels
#15. They did not, however, infect the air as the Sudanese sun dried them up like mummies; all had the hue of gray parchment, and were so much alike that the bodies of the Europeans, Egyptians, and negroes could not be distinguished from each other.
Henryk Sienkiewicz
#16. We demand in the Reconstruction suffrage for all the citizens of the Republic. I would not talk of Negroes or women, but of citizens.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#17. 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
#18. I knew that, in a large degree, we were trying an experiment
that of testing whether or not it was possible for Negroes to build up and control the affairs of a large education institution. I knew that if we failed it wold injure the whole race.
Booker T. Washington
#19. Negroes
Sweet and docile,
Meek, humble, and kind:
Beware the day
They change their minds!
Wind
In the cotton fields,
Gentle breeze:
Beware the hour
It uproots trees!
Langston Hughes
#20. Schoolteacher didn't take advice from Negroes. The information they offered he called backtalk and developed a variety of corrections (which he recorded in his notebook) to reeducate them.
Toni Morrison
#21. The Civil War won formal rights for Negroes, but failed to win social justice and factual democracy. The actual result has been segregation, and fear and ignorance for both whites and blacks.
Paul Goodman
#22. But the differences between the two races, especially that of colour, led Jefferson to advocate the total removal of the Negroes, after emancipation, "beyond the reach of mixture." My dear Miss Sally Hemings, has the man no shame?
Randall Robinson
#23. What we have done with the American Indian is its way as bad as what we imposed on the Negroes. We took a proud and independent race and virtually destroyed them. We have to find ways to bring them back into decent lives in this country.
Richard M. Nixon
#24. 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
#25. They're Americans when they win races, and when they get conscripted into the army,' Dave said. 'But they're Negroes when they want to buy the house next door to yours.
Ken Follett
#26. Marijuana is the most violence causing drug in the history of mankindMost marijuana smokers are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers.
Harry J. Anslinger
#27. The laws of certain states ... give an ownership in the service of Negroes as personal property ... But being men, by the laws of God and nature, they were capable of acquiring liberty - and when the captor in war ... thought fit to give them liberty, the gift was not only valid, but irrevocable.
Alexander Hamilton
#28. 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
#29. United States, your banner wears Two emblems
one of fame; Alas! the other that it bears Reminds us of your shame. Your banner's constellation types White freedom with its stars, But what's the meaning of the stripes? They mean your negroes' scars.
Thomas Campbell
#30. Offhand, the only North American writers I can think of who have come from a background of rural poverty and gone on to write about it have been Negroes.
Alden Nowlan
#31. Why, they're the dirtiest guys in any town. They're the same ones that burned the houses of old German people during the war. They're the same ones that lynch Negroes. They like to be cruel. They like to hurt people, and they always give it a nice name, patriotism or protecting the constitution.
John Steinbeck
#32. You say you will not fight to free negroes. Some of them seem willing to fight for you; but, no matter. Fight you, then exclusively to save the Union.
Abraham Lincoln
#33. Our people" have functioned in this country for nearly a century as political weapons, the trump card up the enemies' sleeve; anything promised Negroes at election time is also a threat leveled at the opposition; in the struggle for mastery the Negro is the pawn.
James Baldwin
#34. There were no politics to polarize us then, to magnify every slight. The "negroes" of Washington had their public schools, restaurants, bars, movie houses, playgrounds and churches; and we had ours.
Pat Buchanan
#35. The intelligence and ability of a colored person are in pretty direct proportion to the amount of white blood he has, and ... most of the positions of leadership, influence, and prominence in the Negro race are held not by real Negroes but by Mulattoes, many of whom have very little Negro blood.
Madison Grant
#37. There have been so few decent films involving Negroes that right away everybody expects every film to do everything. But when you make a flick, there are maybe two things you're trying to put into that flick. You can put the other things in another time.
Jim Brown
#38. Some of the American whites, moreover, are just as far behind in this respect as are the Negroes who have had less opportunity to learn better.
Carter G. Woodson
#39. Somebody has been cashing checks, and they've been bouncing back on us. And these people, the poor class of Negroes and the poor class of white people, they're getting tired of it.
Howlin' Wolf
#40. America has this understanding of Africans that plays like National Geographic: a bunch of Negroes with loincloths running around the plain fields of Africa chasing gazelles.
Djimon Hounsou
#41. 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
#42. The yellow Indians do have a meagre talent. The Negroes are far below them, and at the lowest point are a part of the American people.
Immanuel Kant
#43. Not one black man is prominent in Brazil. The Negroes there are still at the bottom.
Malcolm X
#44. It is notoriously true that the public mind is seriously agitated with apprehensions of negroes insurrections and that it is becoming more and more so.
Thomas L. Smith
#45. The problem with hatred and violence is that they intensity the fears of the white majority, and leave them less ashamed of their prejudices toward Negroes.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#46. There are 100,000 total marijuana smokers in the US, and most are Negroes, Hispanics, Filipinos and entertainers. Their Satanic music, jazz and swing, result from marijuana usage. This marijuana causes white women to seek sexual relations with Negroes, entertainers and any others.
Harry J. Anslinger
#47. I want to take Negroes out of the ghetto and put them in good neighborhoods in good houses.
Malcolm X
#48. The evil system of colonialism and imperialism arose and throve with the enslavement of Negroes and the trade in Negroes, and it will surely come to its end with the complete emancipation of the Black people.
Mao Tse-tung
#49. Though it is a painful fact that most Negroes are hopelessly docile, many of them are filled with fury, and the unctuous coating of flattery which surrounds and encases that fury is but a form of self-preservation.
William Styron
#50. I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.
Bayard Rustin
#51. Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is dishonor in being slave-owners.
Mahatma Gandhi
#52. Many of those who signed the Declaration of Independence were slaveholders. They did not release their slaves upon signing the Declaration, nor did they consider themselves hypocrites. In their view, the rights of men had little to do with Negroes. The
Yuval Noah Harari
#53. Women and negroes, being seven-twelfths of the people, are a majority; and according to our republican theory, are the rightful rulers of the nation.
Elizabeth Cady Stanton
#54. A Negro just can't be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up in the neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business, were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched.
Malcolm X
#55. The education of the Negroes, then, the most important thing in the uplift of the Negroes, is almost entirely in the hands of those who have enslaved them and now segregate them.
Carter G. Woodson
#56. The Negro is the child of two cultures - Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#57. All Negroes shall be prohibited from voting, holding public office, practicing law, medicine, or teaching in any class above the grade of grammar school, and they shall be taxed 100 per cent of all sums in excess of $10,000 per family per year which they may earn or in any other manner receive.
Sinclair Lewis
#58. Behind the murder of millions of Negroes annually in Africa is the well organized system of exploitation by the alien intruders who desire to rob Africa of every bit of its wealth for the satisfaction of their race and the upkeep of their bankrupt European countries.
Marcus Garvey
#59. They lived on the surface of their days; their smiles were surface smiles, and their tears were surface tears. Negroes lived a truer and deeper life than they, but I wished that Negroes, too, could live as thoughtlessly, serenely as they.
Richard Wright
#60. Negroes could be sold - actually sold as we sell cattle, with no reference to calves or bulls or recognition of family. It was a nasty business. The white South was properly ashamed of it and continually belittled and almost denied it. But it was a stark and bitter fact.
W.E.B. Du Bois
#61. I do not share the gloomy thought that Negroes in America are doomed to be stomped out bodaciously, nor even shackled to the bottom of things. Of course some of them will be tromped out, and some will always be at the bottom, keeping company with other bottom-folks.
Zora Neale Hurston
#62. I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream
a dream yet unfulfilled.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#63. White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.
Jesse Helms
#64. If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.
Carter G. Woodson
#65. We all have our moments of initiation into the Society of Former Negroes. Mine was in a class in undergrad when I was asked to give the black perspective, only I had no idea what that was. So I just made something up.
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
#66. The fire trucks are out, there are thousands of people in the streets. You have a choice. You can have this, or you let Negroes eat at the lunch counters.
Burke Marshall
#67. Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain, /May be refin'd and join th' angelic train.
Phillis Wheatley
#68. What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.
Jean Genet
#69. Negroes' problem is that they do not have their egos. That's why our churches end up having a white service, because our preacher is not arrogant enough to take God's word, so he have to go and get some white fellow's agenda and put it in his church.
Jesse Jackson
#70. Negroes, like other people, act upon motives. Why should they do anything for us, if we will do nothing for them? If they stake their lives for us, they must be prompted by the strongest motive, even the promise of freedom. And the promise being made, must be kept.
Abraham Lincoln
#71. I'd become sort of involved in things that were happening to people. No matter what color they be, whether they be Indians, or Negroes, the poor white person or anyone who was I thought more or less getting a bad shake.
Gordon Parks
#72. The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.
Malcolm X
#74. For above all, in behalf of an ailing world which sorely needs our defiance, may we, as Negroes or women, never accept the notion of - our place.
Lorraine Hansberry
#75. Good education, housing and jobs are imperatives for the Negroes, and I shall support them in their fight to win these objectives, but I shall tell the Negroes that while these are necessary, they cannot solve the main Negro problem.
Malcolm X
#76. We were Negroes and our concern was the white man and how to get along with him; how to hold our own and raise ourselves in his esteem without for one moment letting him think he had any God-given rights that we did not also have.
John Howard Griffin
#77. I'd like a hamburger and a coke, please. / Sir, we don't serve negroes here. / Ma'am, I don't eat negroes. I'd like a hamburger and a coke.
Joseph Lowery
#78. A major of colored troops is here with his party capturing negroes, with or without their consent ... They are being conscripted.
John A. Logan
#79. It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.
Zora Neale Hurston
#80. These negroes aren't asking for no nation. They wanna crawl back on the plantation.
Malcolm X
#81. Some negroes lie, some are immoral, some negro men are not be trusted around women - black and white. But this is a truth that applies to the human race and to no particular race of men.
Harper Lee
#82. In spite of the Puritan-Yankee equation of virtue with well-being, Negroes had excellent reasons for doubting that money was made or kept by any very striking adherence to the Christian virtues; it certainly did not work that way for black Christians.
James Baldwin
#84. The study of women's intelligence and personality has had broadly the same history as the one we record for Negroes ... in drawing a parallel between the position of, and feeling toward, women and Negroes, we are uncovering a fundamental basis of our culture.
Gunnar Myrdal
#85. Every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.
Susan B. Anthony
#86. One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists.
Carter G. Woodson
#87. They put the Negroes in the schools, and now they've driven God out.
George Andrews
#88. ON his way out of the museum Atwater passed Nosworth, arguing in the evening sunshine with a party of negroes, who stood about him in ungainly positions, near in spirit to the Anglo-Saxon attitudes of First Messenger.
Anthony Powell
#89. I am not prejudiced against the Negro. When I was governor, I did more to help the Negroes in our State than any previous Governor, and I think you can find Negro leaders in the State who will attest to this fact.
Strom Thurmond
#90. In schools of theology Negroes are taught the interpretation of the Bible worked out by those who have justified segregation and winked at the economic debasement of the Negro at times almost to the point of starvation.
Carter G. Woodson
#91. During a crisis period, a desperate attempt is made by the extremists to influence the minds of the liberal forces in the ruling majority. So, for example, in the present transition white Southerners attempt to convince Northern whites that the Negroes are inherently criminal.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#92. Negroes don't even like snails! What they're doing is proving they're integrated.
Malcolm X
#93. Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.
James A. Baldwin
#94. Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.
Ethel Waters
#95. Let us prepare TODAY. For the TOMORROWS in the lives of the nations will be so eventful that Negroes everywhere will be called upon to play their part in the survival of the fittest human group.
Marcus Garvey
#96. The children of the white families in town were not permitted to associate with me, because my father was committing the then unpardonable crime, in Southern eyes, of educating negroes.
Lee De Forest
#97. [On James Gould Cozzens' By Love Possessed:] It is a vast enterprise encompassing all sorts of love, except, naturally, those branches which extend to Jews, Negroes, and people who have lost track of their great-grandparents ...
Dorothy Parker
#98. Abraham Lincoln would maintain that he had never been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry.
Doris Kearns Goodwin
#99. Why should the Negroes ever fight against the only nations of the world where racial discrimination is prohibited, and where the people can live freely? Never! I can assure you, they will never fight against either the Soviet Union or the peoples' democracies.
Paul Robeson
#100. For nearly a century, the South made itself believe that Negroes and white people were really communicating. So convinced of this were the white Southerners that they almost made the nation believe that they, and only they, knew the mind of the Southern Negro.
Benjamin E. Mays
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