Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.

One dance had made me the most famous colored woman in the world.

I was a devil in other countries, and I was a little devil in America, too.

I shall dance all my life. . . . I would like to die, breathless, spent, at the end of a dance.

I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.

I like Frenchmen very much, because even when they insult you they do it so nicely.

I ran away from St. Louis, and then I ran away from the United States, because of that terror of discrimination.