Now when you hates you shrinks up inside and gets littler and you squeezes your heart tight and you stays so mad with peoples you feels sick all the time like you needs the doctor.

Racism is so extreme and so pervasive in our American society that no black individual lives in an atmosphere of freedom.

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second generation full of courage issue forth; let a people loving freedom come to growth.

I want my careless song to strike no minor key; no fiend to stand between my body's Southern song - the fusion of the South, my body's song and me.

Only ways you can keep folks hating is to keep them apart and separated from each other.

You is born lucky, and it's better to be born lucky than born rich, cause if you is lucky you can git rich, but if you is born rich and you ain't lucky you is liables to lose all you got.

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories.