Black Quotes
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For Bobby and I to sing R&B and sound black was probably the stupidest thing we could do. White radio stations wouldn't play us because they thought we were black. Black stations wouldn't play us because they thought we were white. Any time you break ground, you go against the grain.
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People say that it was degrading for an Olympic champion to run against a horse, but what was I supposed to do? I had four gold medals, but you can't eat four gold medals. There was no television, no big advertising, no endorsements then. Not for a black man, anyway.
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I never liked my father. He really was a dullard and misanthrope. My mother and he were married for 22, years and it was an ill match. She encouraged me to be a writer. She opened her home to black friends, and this was the 1950s. She didn't care later when I write about her.
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When Patti Fox broke up with me, I typed her name over a thousand times on my manual Olivetti until the entire page was beaten into a stiff sheet of black ink.
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Whatever it takes to get the image to reach that level is what that photographer needs to do. And for me, I just have such a love of the tactile and sensuous quality of a black and white silver gelatin print.
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The natural response of the old-timers is to build a strong moral wall against the outside. This is where the world starts to be painted in black and white, saints inside, and sinners outside the wall.
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Funny is not a color. Being black is only good from the time you get from the curtain to the microphone.
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They are called 'Emos' now, and before that they were 'Goths.' They didn't have a name for it when I was one, but I was that black-wearing teenager and yes, I wore a little eyeliner.
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Acapulco, Mexico: '...queer, dirty little dago town....The people are too revolting for words, super dagoes & some of them are quite black as a result of Spaniards inter-breeding with the Indians; & of course they only speak Spanish' (9 September 1920)
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Way Down South in Dixie (Break the heart of me) They hung my black young lover To a cross roads tree.
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And I used to say, 'I'm black, too.' In other words, I - my whole life I've been called a half-breed, a convict, king of the trailer trash, this and that. I take that and stand.
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As black folks we're always sensitive. As a black person it's always racial.
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It's a slippery slope when you make the argument that hip hop is only a black person's art. Certainly, its origins are in that community, but if you want it to endure as an art form you have to let other people have their way with it.
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I think that the first book that made me think that I could try to be a writer - or that made me aware that a young black woman from the South could write about the South - was Alice Walker's 'The Color Purple,' which I read for the first time when I was in junior high.
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I'm not signing on to direct 'Black Panther.' I think I'll just say we had different ideas about what the story would be. Marvel has a certain way of doing things, and I think they're fantastic, and a lot of people love what they do. I loved that they reached out to me.
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In movies we tend make things black and white: you're either this, or you're that.
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I think that, for so much of our matriculation through American society, black people sort of feel like outsiders.
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Berry was a transitional and, to my mind, revolutionary black figure who had to find a place for the rage that the crucible of racism created.
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Edgar Allan Poe, an earlier UVA student, once complained in a letter that his stepfather spoke to him as if Poe were one of the black slaves; some of the students at UVA surely felt the same about being told what to do by faculty.
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Whether defending our nation as a Black Hawk pilot abroad or serving our veterans and those in need at home, my life has been enriched by the opportunities I've had to serve my country and fellow citizens, both in and out of uniform.
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I've had times where one of my roommates was moving out of the house in college, and because we were the only black people in that neighborhood, the cops got called, and we had guns drawn on us. Came in the house, without knocking, guns drawn on my teammates and roommates. So I have experienced this.
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I feel like I come from a smaller off shoot of black people because I am mixed. People say I'm African American but that doesn't include the other half of me.
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As a kid I didn't see black cowboys on the screen. What that said to me was that there were things I couldn't do or be because of my color. What we see others like us do gives us permission to expand our own horizons.
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Being biracial is sort of like being in a secret society. Most people I know of that mix have a real ability to be in a room with anyone, black or white.
