Blacks Quotes

“I have to think about that one for a minute. “Everybody’s pissed ’cause One-Fifteen hasn’t been charged,” I say, “but also because he’s not the first one to do something like this and get away with it. It’s been happening, and people will keep rioting until it changes. So I guess the system’s still giving hate, and everybody’s still getting fucked?”

Daddy laughs and gives me dap. “My girl. Watch your mouth, but yeah, that’s about right. And we won’t stop getting fucked till it changes. That’s the key. It’s gotta change.”

A lump forms in my throat as the truth hits me. Hard. “That’s why people are speaking out, huh? Because it won’t change if we don’t say something."

"Exactly. We can't be silent."

"So I can't be silent.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“What, you think if you live next door to them, they'll treat you different?"

"Why does it always have to be about race with you?" Uncle Carlos asks. "Other races aren't killing us nearly as much as we're killing ourselves."

"Ne-gro, please. If I kill Tyrone, I'm going to prison. If a cop kills me, he's getting put on leave. Maybe.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“To an American Negro living in the northern part of the United States the word South has an unpleasant sound, an overtone of horror and of fear. For it is in the South that our ancestors were slaves for three hundred years, bought and sold like cattle. It is in the South today that we suffer the worst forms of racial persecution and economic exploitation--segregation, peonage, and lynching. It is in the Southern states that the color line is hard and fast, Jim Crow rules, and I am treated like a dog. Yet it is in the South that two-thirds of my people live: A great Black Belt stretching from Virginia to Texas, across the cotton plantations of Georgia and Alabama and Mississippi, down into the orange groves of Florida and the sugar cane lands of Louisiana. It is in the South that black hands create the wealth that supports the great cities--Atlanta, Memphis, New Orleans, where the rich whites live in fine houses on magnolia-shaded streets and the Negroes live in slums restricted by law. It is in the South that what the Americans call the "race problem" rears its ugly head the highest and, like a snake with its eyes on a bird, holds the whole land in its power. It is in the South that hate and terror walk the streets and roads by day, sometimes quiet, sometimes violent, and sleep n the beds with the citizens at night.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Nine Negro boys in Alabama were on trial for their lives when I got back from Cuba and Haiti. The famous Scottsboro "rape" case was in full session. I visited those boys in the death house at Kilby Prison, and I wrote many poems about them. One of those poems was:

CHRIST IN ALABAMA

Christ is a Nigger,
Beaten and black--
O, bare your back.

Mary is His Mother--
Mammy of the South,
Silence your mouth.

God's His Father--
White Master above,
Grant us your love.

Most holy bastard
Of the bleeding mouth:
Nigger Christ
On the cross of the South.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“The ironic thing is though, at Williamson I don't have to "play it cool"--I'm cool by default because I'm one of the only black kids there.....

Funny how it works with white kids though. It's dope to be black until it's hard to be black.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“On the train I had a lot of time to think. I thought how in the thirty years of my life I had seldom gotten on a train in America without being conscious of my color. In the South, there are Jim Crow cars and Negroes must ride separate from the whites, usually in a filthy antiquated coach next to the engine, getting all the smoke and bumps and dirt. In the South, we cannot buy sleeping car tickets. Such comforts are only for white folks. And in the North where segregated travel is not the law, colored people have, nevertheless, many difficulties. In auto buses they must take the seats in the rear, over the wheels. On the boats they must occupy the worst cabins. The ticket agents always say that all other accommodations are sold. On trains, if one sits down by a white person, the white person will sometimes get up, flinging back an insult at the Negro who has dared to take a seat beside him. Thus it is that in America, if you are yellow, brown, or black, you can never travel anywhere without being reminded of your color, and oft-times suffering great inconveniences.

I sat in the comfortable sleeping car on my first day out of Moscow and remembered many things about trips I had taken in America. I remembered how, once as a youngster going alone to see my father who was working in Mexico, I went into the dining car of the train to eat. I sat down at a table with a white man. The man looked at me and said, "You're a nigger, ain't you?" and left the table. It was beneath his dignity to eat with a Negro child. At St. Louis I went onto the station platform to buy a glass of milk. The clerk behind the counter said, “We don't serve niggers," and refused to sell me anything. As I grew older I learned to expect this often when traveling. So when I went South to lecture on my poetry at Negro universities, I carried my own food because I knew I could not go into the dining cars. Once from Washington to New Orleans, I lived all the way on the train on cold food. I remembered this miserable trip as I sat eating a hot dinner on the diner of the Moscow-Tashkent express.

Traveling South from New York, at Washington, the capital of our country, the official Jim Crow begins. There the conductor comes through the train and, if you are a Negro, touches you on the shoulder and says, "The last coach forward is the car for colored people." Then you must move your baggage and yourself up near the engine, because when the train crosses the Potomac River into Virginia, and the dome of the Capitol disappears, it is illegal any longer for white people and colored people to ride together. (Or to eat together, or sleep together, or in some places even to work together.) Now I am riding South from Moscow and am not Jim-Crowed, and none of the darker people on the train with me are Jim-Crowed, so I make a happy mental note in the back of my mind to write home to the Negro papers: "There is no Jim Crow on the trains of the Soviet Union.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“All the problems known to the Jews today in Hitler's Germany, we who are Negroes know here in America--with one difference. Here we may speak openly about our problems, write about them, protest, and seek to better our conditions. In Germany the Jews may do none of these things. Democracy permits us the freedom of a hope, and some action towards the realization of that hope.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Poets who write mostly about love, roses and moonlight, sunsets and snow, must lead a very quiet life. Seldom, I imagine, does their poetry get them into difficulties. Beauty and lyricism are really related to another world, to ivory towers, to your head in the clouds, feet floating off the earth. Unfortunately, having been born poor--and also colored--in Missouri, I was stuck in the mud from the beginning. Try as I might to float off into the clouds, poverty and Jim Crow would grab me by the heels, and right back on earth I would land.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“That evening there were police outside the building in which I spoke, and in the air the rising tension of race that is peculiar to the South. It had been rumored that some of the local citizenry were saying that I should be run out of town, and that one of the sheriffs agreed, saying, "Sure, he ought to be run out! It's bad enough to call Christ a bastard. But when he calls him a nigger, he's gone too far!"...

...Nevertheless, I remember with pleasure the courtesy and kindness of many of the students and faculty at Chapel Hill and their lack of agreement with the anti-Negro elements of the town. There I began to learn at the University of North Carolina how hard it is to be a white liberal in the South.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“So goes the life of social poet. I am sure none of these things would ever have happened to me had I limited the subject matter of my poems to roses and moonlight. But, unfortunately, I was born poor--and colored--and almost all the prettiest roses I have seen have been in rich white people's yards--not in mine. That is why I cannot write exclusively about roses and moonlight--for sometimes in the moonlight my brothers see a fiery cross and a circle of Klansmen's hoods. Sometimes in the moonlight a dark body sways from a lynching tree--but for his funeral there are no roses.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“One-Fifteen sits on the sidewalk with his face buried in his hands. Other officers pat his shoulder and tell him it'll be okay.

They finally put a sheet over Khalil. He can't breathe under it. I can't breathe.

I can't.

Breathe.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“Good afternoon, Ms. Carter," Dr. Davis, the headmaster, says. He's leaving as I'm going in and doesn't wait for my response. Does he know all the students by name, or just the ones who are black like him? I hate that I think about stuff like that now.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“The black officer checks Daddy while his partner glances around at all of the onlookers. There's quite a few of us now. Ms. Yvette and a couple of her clients stand in her doorway, towels around the clients' shoulders. A car has stopped in the street.

"Everyone, go about your own business," the white one says.

"No, sir," says Tim. "This is our business.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“Has this situation made you fearful of cops?" she eventually asks.

"I don't know," I say truthfully. "My uncle's a cop. I know not all cops are bad. And they risk their lives, you know? I'm always scared for my uncle. But I'm tired of them assuming. Especially when it comes to black people.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“In America the magazines in which one can frequently publish stories or poems about Negroes are very few, and most of these do not pay, since they are of a social service or proletarian nature. The big American bourgeois publications are very careful about what they publish by or about colored people. Exotic or humorous tales they will occasionally use. Stories that show Negroes as savages, fools, or clowns, they will often print. And once in a blue moon there may be a really sound and serious literary picture of black life in a big magazine--but it doesn't happen often enough to feed an author. They can't live on blue moons. Most colored writers find their work turned down with a note that the files are already full of "Negro material," or that the subject is not suitable, or, as happened to me recently when I submitted a story about a more or less common situation in American interracial life--the manuscript was returned with regrets since the story was "excellently written, but it would shock our good middle-class audience to death." And thus our American publications shy away from the Negro problem and the work of Negro writers.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“There is in Moscow a great curiosity for things American, and a great sympathy for things Negro. So, being both an American and a Negro, I am met everywhere with friendly questions from children and adults as to how we live at home. Is there really a crisis, with people hungry and ragged when there are in America so many factories, so much technique, so much wheat, and cotton and livestock? How can that be? Do they actually kill people in electric chairs? Actually lynch Negroes? Why?

The children in the Moscow streets, wise little city children, will oft times gather around you if you are waiting for a streetcar, or looking into a shop window. They will take your hand and ask you about the Scottsboro boys, or if you like the Soviet Union and are going to stay forever. Sometimes as you pass a group of children playing, they will stop and exclaim, "Negro!" But in wonder and surprise a long ways from the insulting derision of the word "Nigger" in the mouths of America's white children. Here, the youth in the schools are taught to respect all races.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“In the course of our conversation, I learned that there were many cities in Central Asia where dark men and women are in control of the government. And I thought about Mississippi where more than half of the population is Negro, but one never hears of a colored person in the government. In fact, in the state Negroes cannot even vote. And you will never meet them riding in the sleeping car.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“I come from a land whose democracy from the very beginning has been tainted with race prejudice born of slavery, and whose richness has been poured through the narrow channels of greed into the hands of the few. I come to the Second International Writers Congress representing my country, America, but most especially the Negro peoples of America, and the poor peoples of America—because I am both a Negro and poor. And that combination of color and of poverty gives me the right then to speak for the most oppressed group in America, that group that has known so little of American democracy, the fifteen million Negroes who dwell within our borders.

We are the people who have long known in actual practice the meaning of the word Fascism—for the American attitude towards us has always been one of economic and social discrimination: in many states of our country Negroes are not permitted to vote or to hold political office. In some sections freedom of movement is greatly hindered, especially if we happen to be sharecroppers on the cotton farms of the South. All over America we know what it is to be refused admittance to schools and colleges, to theatres and concert halls, to hotels and restaurants. We know Jim Crow cars, race riots, lynchings, we know the sorrows of the nine Scottsboro boys, innocent young Negroes imprisoned some six years now for a crime that even the trial judge declared them not guilty of having committed, and for which some of them have not yet come to trial. Yes, we Negroes in America do not have to be told what Fascism is in action. We know. Its theories of Nordic supremacy and economic suppression have long been realities to us.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“We Negroes of America are tired of a world divided superficially on the basis of blood and color, but in reality on the basis of poverty and power—the rich over the poor, no matter what their color. We Negroes of America are tired of a world in which it is possible for any group of people to say to another: "You have no right to happiness, or freedom, or the joy of life." We are tired of a world where forever we work for someone else and the profits are not ours. We are tired of a world where, when we raise our voices against oppression, we are immediately jailed, intimidated, beaten, sometimes lynched. Nicolás GuiIlén has been in prison in Cuba, Jacques Roumain, in Haiti, Angelo Herndon in the United States. Today a letter comes from the great Indian writer, Raj Anand, saying that he cannot be with us here in Paris because the British police in England have taken his passport from him. I say, we darker peoples of the earth are tired of a world in which things like that can happen.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“And now, in Madrid, Spain's besieged capital, I've met wide-awake Negroes from various parts of the world--New York, our Middle West, the French West Indies, Cuba, Africa--some stationed here, others on leave from their battalions--all of them here because they know that if Fascism creeps across Spain, across Europe, and then across the world, there will be no place left for intelligent young Negroes at all. In fact, no decent place for any Negroes--because Fascism preaches the creed of Nordic supremacy and a world for whites alone.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“There are some very stupid men in the capitals of the Western World--the more stupid because they think they are so wise. It would seem to me that almost anybody would know by now that colored peoples do not like to be ruled by outside forces, Jim Crowed, segregated, told what to do by aliens, and in general kicked around.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“And expose war. And the old My-Country-'Tis-of' Thee lie. And the colored American Legion posts strutting around talking about the privilege of dying for the noble Red, White, and Blue, when they aren't even permitted the privilege of living for it. Or voting for it in Texas. Or working for it in the diplomatic service. Or even rising, like every other good little boy, from the log cabin to the White House.

White House is right.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“So, in summary: The market for Negro writers is very limited. Jobs as professional writers, editorial assistants, publisher's readers, etc., are almost non-existent. Hollywood insofar as Negroes are concerned, might just as well be controlled by Hitler. The common courtesies of decent travel, hotel and restaurant accommodations, politeness from doormen, elevatormen, and hired attendants in public places is practically everywhere in America denied Negroes, whether they be writers or not. Black authors, too, must ride in Jim Crow cars.

These are some of our problems. What can you who are writers do to help us solve them? What can you, our public, do to help us solve them? My problem, your problem. No, I'm wrong! It is not a matter of mine and yours. It is a matter of ours. We are all Americans. We want to create the American dream, a finer and more democratic America. I cannot do it without you. You cannot do it omitting me. Can we march together then?

But perhaps the word march is the wrong word—suggesting soldiers and armies. Can we not put our heads together and think and plan—not merely dream—the future America? And then create it with our hands? A land where even a Negro writer can make a living, if he is a good writer. And where, being a Negro, he need not be a secondary American.

We do not want any secondary Americans. We do not want a weak and imperfect democracy. We do not want poverty and hunger and prejudice and fear on the part of any portion of our population. We want America to really be America for everybody. Let us make it so!”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Writing is the urge to tell folks about it. About what? About what hurts you inside. Colored folks, through the sheer fact of being colored, have got plenty hurting them inside. You see, we, too, are one of those minority races the newspapers are always talking about. Except that we are here in America, not in Europe, fourteen million of us--a rather large minority, but still a minority.

Now, what's hurting us? Well, Jim Crow is hurting us. Ghettos, and segregation, and lack of jobs is hurting us. Signs up: COLORED TRADE NOT DESIRED, and dirty names such as the Jews know under Hitler hurt us. So those of us who are writers have plenty to tell the world about.

To us democracy is a paradox, full of contradictions.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Dream of Freedom

There’s a dream in the land
With its back against the wall.
By muddled names and strange
Sometimes the dream is called.

There are those who claim
This dream for theirs alone—
A sin for which, we know
They must atone.

Unless shared in common
Like sunlight and like air,
The dream will die for lack
Of substance anywhere.

The dream knows no frontier or tongue,
The dream no class or race.
The dream cannot be kept secure
In any one locked place.

This dream today embattled,
With its back against the wall—
To save the dream for one,
It must be saved for ALL.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Don't be scared 'bout Monday. Tell the cops the truth, and don't let them put words in your mouth. God gave you a brain. You don't need theirs. And remember that you didn't do nothing wrong--the cop did. Don't let them make you think otherwise."

..."You think the cops want Khalil to have justice?" I ask.

Thump-thump-thump. Thump ... thump ... thump. The truth casts a shadow over the kitchen--people like us in situations like this become hashtags, but they rarely get justice. I think we all wait for that one time though, that one time when it ends right.

Maybe this can be it.

"I don't know," Daddy says. "I guess we'll find out.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“This hurts.

But I swear I wanna cuss Khalil out. How could he sell the very stuff that took his momma from him? Did he realize that he was taking somebody else's momma from them?

Did he realize that if he does become a hashtag, some people will only see him as a drug dealer?

He was so much more than that.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“She pats my hair and says, "White people do stupid shit sometimes.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“You mean when you called Khalil a drug dealer?"

He nods. "Even if he was, I knew that boy. Watched him grow up with you. He was more than any bad decision he made," he says. "I hate that I let myself fall into that mind-set of trying to rationalize his death. And at the end of the day, you don't kill someone for opening a car door. If you do, you shouldn't be a cop.”
― Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give

“If you're Black in America doing politics, Republicans have a tendency to be existential enemies. And white Democrats are totally unreliable.”
― Mike Jones