To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

how can one respect, let alone adopt, the values of a people who do not, on any level whatever, live the way they say they do, or the way they say they should?

Great art can only be created out of love.

It will be hard James but you come from sturdy peasant stock men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads and in the teeth of the most terrifying odds achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity You come from a long line of great poets some of the greatest poets since Homer. One of them said "The very time I thought I was lost My dungeon shook and my chains fell off." You know and I know that the country is celebrating one hundred years of freedom one hundred years too soon. We cannot be free until they are free. God bless you James and Godspeed.

One day, to everyone’s astonishment, someone drops a match in the powder keg and everything blows up.

People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own destruction.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.