And who will join this standing up and the ones who stood without sweet company will sing and sing back into the mountains and if necessary even under the sea: we are the ones we have been waiting for.

In America, you can segregate the people, but the problems will travel. From slavery to equal rights, from state suppression of dissent to crime, drugs and unemployment, I can't think of a supposedly Black issue that hasn't wasted the original Black target group and then spread like measles to outlying white experience.

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

There is a man who exists as one of the most popular objects of leadership, legislation, and quasi-literature in the history of all men. . . . This man, that object of attention, attack, and vast activity, cannot make himself be heard, let alone understood. He has never been listened to. . . . That man is Black and alive in white America where the media of communication do not allow the delivery of his own voice, his own desires, his own rage.

I am a stranger, learning to love the strangers around me

In America, the traditional routes to black identity have hardly been normal. Suicide (disappearance by imitation, or willed extinction), violence (hysterical religiosity, crime, armed revolt), and exemplary moral courage; none of these is normal.

Like running trying to live a good life has to hurt a little bit, or we're not running hard enough, not really trying.