A nation within a nation: We are a nation primarily because we think we are a nation / Hannah Nelson ; Sometimes I wonder if there are any other Americans besides us / Harriet Jones ; That man has got his country and we are our country / John Oliver
The legacy of slavery: When you don't know when you have been spit on, it does not matter too much what else you think you know / Ruth Shays ; In many ways I was more of a slave than most of my black ancestors / Grant Smith ; Many people say our people are unpredictable / Carolyn Chase ; There is nothing on this earth as low and lazy and cowardly as a cracker / Howard Roundtree ; I am a hard woman because I have had a hard time out here / Mabel Lincoln
The many shades of black: He looks as white as any white person, but you'd better not tell him that unless you are ready to go to war / Erica Allen ; One reason the whole thing is so hard to deal with is that nobody really talks about it / Angela McArthur ; It's sex and color the present the most difficulty, right? / Celia Delaney ; I don't trust anybody who would deny their color like that / Rosa Wakefield ; I think that is rotten of them to lie to a blind man like that! / Clinton Banks
The mojo and the sayso: The white man must pretend to know more than he does, but we must always show less than we know / Jackson Jordan, Jr. ; Whitefolks are how folks and blackfolks are what folks / Porter Millington ; The biggest difference between us and white people is the we know when we are playing / Alberta Roberts ; There are two kinds of whitefolks. A few live like they want to and the rest try to live like their big boss leaders / Sims Patrick ; The power to do one thing is never the power to do all things / Bernard Vanderstell
The welfare siege: We need to get up, not just get over / Janet McCrae ; These whitefolks is evermore giving people things they cannot use or do not want / Melvin Gabriel Wilmot ; I thank God that I didn't need anything from the white man / Hattie Lanarck ; You can't just take anything this man hands out, because he has a hundred different kinds of chains / Gilbert Lanarck ; You push enough for the white man and you get a Cadillac out of his small change / Kenneth Simmons
Sex and work: When you lose control if your body, you have just about lost all you have in this world! / Nancy White ; One thing about Cal'donia, if she don't want you, you are out of luck because that thing between her legs is hers and hers alone / Clifford Yancy ; He was a man and I was a woman, so we didn't neither of us have to raise the other / Mabel Johns ; I can handle black men; what I can't handle is this prejudice / May Anna Madison
Turn: Christ warned us by his life and death, so who am I that I should not warn my daughter by my life? / Yula Moses ; If you teach your children to be fair and honest only some of the time and oly to some people, you are really telling them that the truth is unimportant / Joseph Langstaff ; I feel like something heavy just rolled off my chest / Edith Baker ; In high school they told me that it was the wonderful world of work and my father told me, "Shug, it's a bitch out there" / Avis Briar ; A junkie generally has to mess up the people he can
that means his mother or his sisters or his brothers / Margaret Lawson ; My daughter listens to me sometimes, but I listened to my mother all the time / Ellen Saunders ; Now, how is having a lot of fatherless children for the white man to half support going to help us? / Janice Saunders ; I always wanted ny mother to be proud of me, but I never really turned out to be nothin' / Estelle O'Connor Kent
More than mere survival: All these doctors want to do is cut your arm ortarve you / Velma Cunningham ; Right now, every day is just something you got to get through / Seth Bingham ; I'm no respecter of churches in the same way that the Lord is no respecter of persons / Johnetta Ray ; God is the baddest ass in the firmament! / Gordon Etheridge ; Some people are the horse shit of the earth / Ella Turner Surry ; A faithful person means more than anything else in the world! / Gloria Melton ; I have learned to stop feeling sorry for myself, I think / Jonathan Melton.
