What am I most ashamed of in my life? Not keeping my promise to my sister and being too scared of America to attend her funeral.

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.

I have two loves: my country and Paris.

Each time I leaped I seemed to touch the sky and when I regained earth it seemed to be mine alone.

The things we truly love stay with us always, locked in our hearts as long as life remains.

The old Catholic parties hounded me with a Christian hatred from station to station, city to city, one stage to another.

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.