Negro Quotes

You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers, and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too. (Paul Robeson)
One ever feels his twoness - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
I regard the Klan, the Anglo-Saxon clubs and White American societies, as far as the Negro is concerned, as better friends of the race than all other groups of hypocritical whites put together. View quote
Marcus Garvey
To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time. View quote
James Baldwin
I think America concedes that true American music has sprung from the Negro. View quote
W. C. Handy
If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto. View quote
Carter Woodson
It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society. View quote
Martin Luther King Jr.
To rob the Negro of his reputation of thinking through a problem in his own fashion is about the same as trying to pretend that he doesn't have a natural instinct for rhythm and for singing and dancing. View quote
Jesse Helms
The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights. View quote
Jesse Helms
If you want to be fully convinced of the abominations of slavery, go on a southern plantation, and call yourself a negro trader. Then there will be no concealment; and you will see and hear things that will seem to you impossible among human beings with immortal souls. View quote
Harriet Ann Jacobs
Only those who hate the Negro see hatred in the Negro. (José Martí)
What we really need the poet's and orator's I help to keep alive in us is not, then, the common and gregarious courage which Robert Shaw showed when he marched with you, men of the Seventh Regiment. It is that more lonely courage which he showed when he dropped his warm commission in the glorious Second to head your dubious fortunes, negroes of the Fifty-fourth. That lonely kind of courage (civic courage as we call it in times of peace) is the kind of valor to which the monuments of nations should most of all be reared. View quote
William James
[T]he intelligence and ability of a colored person are in pretty direct proportion to the amount of white blood he has, and ... most of the positions of leadership, influence, and prominence in the Negro race are held not by real Negroes but by Mulattoes, many of whom have very little Negro blood. View quote
Madison Grant
I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called, below him appear the Negro and the Indian. View quote
Alexis de Tocqueville
I'd like a hamburger and a coke, please. / Sir, we don't serve negroes here. / Ma'am, I don't eat negroes. I'd like a hamburger and a coke. View quote
Joseph Lowery
Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy and consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
The most ordinary Negro is a distinct gentleman, but it takes extraordinary training and opportunity to make the average white man anything but a hog. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
The Negro cannot stand the present reactionary tendencies and unreasoning drawing of the color line indefinitely without discouragement and retrogression. And the condition of the Negro is ever the cause for further discrimination. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
Unfortunately there was one thing that the white South feared more than Negro dishonesty, ignorance, and incompetency, and that was Negro honesty, knowledge, and efficiency. View quote
W. E. B. Du Bois
What we really want to do is to be left alone. We don't want Negroes around. We don't need Negroes around. We're not asking - you know, we don't want to have them, you know, for our culture. We simply want our own country and our own society. That's in no way exploitive at all. We want our own society, our own nation.... (David Duke)
The laws of certain states ...give an ownership in the service of negroes as personal property.... But being men, by the laws of God and nature, they were capable of acquiring liberty-and when the captor in war ...thought fit to give them liberty, the gift was not only valid, but irrevocable. View quote
Alexander Hamilton
Why reasonable people go stark raving mad when anything involving a Negro comes up, is something I don't pretend to understand. View quote
Harper Lee
Every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes. View quote
Susan B. Anthony
The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation. View quote
Frantz Fanon