One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black. It was only a country for white people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States... A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn't stand it anymore... I felt liberated in Paris.

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

Let us stop saying 'white Americans' and 'colored Americans,' let us try once and for all saying... Americans. Let human beings be equal on Earth as in Heaven.

The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling... How can you expect the world to believe in you and respect your preaching of democracy when you yourself treat your colored brothers as you do?

Beautiful? It's all a question of luck. I was born with good legs. As for the rest... beautiful, no. Amusing, yes.

Art is an elastic sort of love.

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.