“When we’re unemployed, we’re called lazy; when the whites are unemployed it’s called a depression.”

We were fundamentally the same. They expressed their anger more willingly. We developed the capacity to internalize our anger, using a nonviolent discipline.

The only justification for ever looking down on somebody is to pick them up.

Tears will get you sympathy, sweat will get you change.

In many ways, history is marked as ‘before’ and ‘after’ Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.

The invasion only made matters worse. The occupation will not work, Iraq is unoccupiable, that will not work.

When the doors of opportunity swing open, we must make sure that we are not too drunk or too indifferent to walk through.

Abortion is black genocide, What happens to the mind of a person and the moral fabric of a nation that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience?

It’s not enough to be quiet. Quietness is the absence of noise. We need peace, the presence of justice and to be – and so people here can coexist and live together.

Hold your head high, stick your chest out. It gets dark sometimes, but morning comes. Keep hope alive.

Giuliani has certainly set a climate for permissiveness of violence and mean police behavior.

We must all learn a good lesson – how to live together. That is the new challenge of the new world, learning to co-exist and not co-annihilate.

These students are courageous and this is an experience they will never forget, They held on to hope and had the strength and determination to survive.

No one wants to see self-destructive riots because there’s no future in riots.

Both tears and sweat are salty, but they render a different result. Tears will get you sympathy; sweat will get you change.

If you wear a hoodie but aren’t registered to vote, you got the symbolism but missed the substance.

The burden of being black is that you have to be superior just to be equal. But the glory of it is that, once you achieve, you have achieved, indeed.

My mom wanted to make sure I was prepared to grow up with Black skin in America.

I’ll tell you what’s at the bottom of it. If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.

I’m an athlete and I’m black, and a lot of black athletes go broke. I do not want to become a statistic, so maybe I overcompensate. But I’m paranoid. Oprah told me a long time ago, ‘You sign every check. Never let anyone sign any checks.’

I am the daughter of Black writers who are descended from Freedom Fighters who broke their chains and changed the world. They call me.

As a young black woman, I notice at times in the mainstream media framing of the ‘me too’ movement you see a white female face or a white male face, and that type of questioning and interrogation needs to happen.

I realized now that militancy in the best sense of the word was the only answer where the black man was concerned, that any black man who wasn’t a militant in 1970 was either blind or a coward.

The black fist is a meaningless symbol. When you open it, you have nothing but fingers – weak, empty fingers. The only time the black fist has significance is when there’s money inside. There’s where the power lies.

I love Black poets. I love that as a Black girl, I get to participate in that legacy. So that’s Yusef Komunyakaa, Sonia Sanchez, Tracy K. Smith, Phillis Wheatley.