Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.

... no young colored person in the United States today can truthfully offer as an excuse for lack of ambition or aspiration that members of his race have accomplished so little, he is discouraged from attempting anything himself. For there is scarcely a field of human endeavor which colored people have been allowed to enter in which there is not at least one worthy representative.

A white woman has only one handicap to overcome - that of sex. I have two - both sex and race. ... Colored men have only one - that of race. Colored women are the only group in this country who have two heavy handicaps to overcome, that of race as well as that of sex.

Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.

I cannot help wondering sometimes what I might have become and might have done if I had lived in a country which had not circumscribed and handicapped me on account of my race, that had allowed me to reach any height I was able to attain.

While most girls run away from home to marry, I ran away to teach.

As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head