“The light-skinned girls always thought they were better looking. So did the teachers, too. That meant most of the dark complexion ones didn’t like themselves.”

As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.

When our founding fathers drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, black people weren’t even considered human.

A lot of African American women wanted to emulate white women. But I said in my mind, rationally thinking, there is no way you are going to get your hair that straight, especially in the summer.

When I told my mother I was pregnant, I thought she was going to have a heart attack.

I was about four years old the first time I ever saw what happened when you acted up to whites.

There were many African Americans – many, many stories similar to my story.

I lost most of my friends. Their parents had told them to stay away from me, because they said I was crazy, I was an extremist.

There was segregation everywhere. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn’t even go into the same restaurants.

Being dragged off that bus was worth it just to see Barack Obama become president, because so many others gave their lives and didn’t get to see it, and I thank God for letting me see it.

When you’ve been abused daily and you see people humiliated and harassed, you just get tired of it.

New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama.

I’d like my grandchildren to be able to see that their grandmother stood up for something, a long time ago.

Rosa Parks wasn’t the first one to rebel against the segregated seats. I was the first one.

We were churchgoing people.

I sleep when the sleep comes down on me.

I left the South in 1963 and was living in Morristown, New Jersey, when the March on Washington took place, so I watched it on television instead.

Music took me from a real dark place to a real bright one.

I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness. My fiery protest is simply the cry of my very soul.

Stars shine brighter when nights are darker and life flourishes most when the rain is heavier.

I like the night. Without the dark, we’d never see the stars.

The cynic is one who never sees a good quality in a man, and never fails to see a bad one. He is the human owl, vigilant in darkness and blind to light, mousing for vermin, and never seeing noble game.

The story was a sleeping girl in a narrow bed Dark hair thick and wild and twisted like seaweed across the pillow.

To drive out the darkness, bring in the light.

If you are afraid of the dark, why do you keep on going back to it? You might be afraid of the light.