I will not take "but" for an answer.

Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop--you are a Negro! . . . Black is powerful.

This is the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America - this urge within the race toward whiteness, the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as little Negro and as much American as possible.

Don't come giving me, who's old enough to die and too near blind to create anything any more anyhow, a great big banquet that you eat up in honor of your own stomachs as much as in honor of me- who's toothless and can't eat.

Frosting Freedom Is just frosting On somebody else's Cake-- And so must be Till we Learn how to Bake.

Books -where if people suffered, they suffered in beautiful language, not in monosyllables, as we did in Kansas

One of the great difficulties about being a member of a minority race is that so many kindhearted, well-meaning bores gather around to help.