Negro Identity Quotes

I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.

The Negro was invented in America.

I was branded a Negro in the States and had to act accordingly. They wouldn't even give me a chance in the big leagues because I was a Negro, yet they accepted every other nationality under the sun.

The Negro is essentially the child of the moment and his memory, both tribal and individual, is very short

America is the only country in the world that classifies as Negro any person who has one drop of African blood in his or her veins.

We are Americans, not only by birth and by citizenship, but by our political ideals, our language, our religion. Farther than that, our Americanism does not go. At that point, we are Negroes, members of a vast historic race that from the very dawn of creation has slept, but half awakening in the dark forests of its African fatherland.

Will the slave fight? If any man asks you, tell him No. But if anyone asks you will a Negro fight, tell him Yes!

Negroes have not thoroughly assimilated.

So Ham's wife that was preserved on the Ark was a Negro of the seed of Cain and there was a priestly purpose in it, that the Devil would have a representation as well as God.

Just being a Negro doesn't qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.

I'm always aware of various audiences, as a part of my training as a journalist and as part of my training as a citizen of Negroland.

We know nothing about Africa, although our roots are there in terms of our forbearers. But I mean as far as the average Negro today, he knows nothing about Africa. And I think he's got to face the fact that he is an American, his culture is basically American, and one becomes adjusted to this when he realizes what, what he is.

The Negro wants to be everything but himself... He wants to integrate with the white man, but he cannot integrate with himself or with his own kind. The Negro wants to lose his identity because he does not know his own identity.

I maintain that I have been a Negro three times--a Negro baby, a Negro girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!

If you teach the Negro that he has accomplished as much good as any other race he will aspire to equality and justice without regard to race. Such an effort would upset the program of the oppressor in Africa and America. Play up before the Negro, then, his crimes and shortcomings. Let him learn to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton. Lead the Negro to detest the man of African blood--to hate himself.

NEGRO :; Member of a subgroup of the human race who hails, or whose ancestors hailed, from a chunk of land nicknamed not by its residents Africa. Superior to the Caucasian in that negroes did not invent nuclear weapons, the automobile, Christianity, nerve gas, the concentration camp, military epidemics, or the megalopolis.

Among Negroes we have Negroes who are as white as some white people. Still there's a difference.

Really, the values under which my generation was raised in the '50s were immigrant values even though we weren't immigrants. The greatest thing you could be was a college-educated Negro.

The Negro is the child of two cultures - Africa and America. The problem is that in the search for wholeness all too many Negroes seek to embrace only one side of their natures.

Only the BLACK WOMAN can say 'when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me.'