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

Stop using the word 'Negro.' The word is a misnomer from every point of view. It does not represent a country or anything else ... I am an African-American.

... some people cannot bear the truth, no matter how tactfully it is told. No doubt the haughty, the tyrannical, the unmerciful, the impure and the fomentors of discord take a fierce exception to the Sermon on the Mount.

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

No one color can describe the various and varied complexions in our group. They range from the deep black to the fairest white with all the colors of the rainbow thrown in for good measure. When twenty or thirty of us meet, it is as hard to find three or four with the same complexion as it would be catch greased lightning in a bottle.

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

Nobody wants to know a colored woman's opinion about her own status of that of her group. When she dares express it, no matter how mild or tactful it may be, it is called 'propaganda,' or is labeled 'controversial.' Those two words have come to have a very ominous sound to me.