“If I do something good then I am American, but if I do something bad then I am a Negro!”
Tommie Smith
“The fact that the adult American Negro female emerges a formidable character is often met with amazement, distaste and even belligerence. It is seldom accepted as an inevitable outcome of the struggle won by survivors, and deserves respect if not ent”
Maya Angelou
“One ever feels his twoness-an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
W. E. B. Du Bois
“It makes me feel good to walk through there and know that some of the things that Negro League players played for has been preserved, and people can go in there, and look at it.”
Hank Aaron
“It would be against all nature for all the Negroes to be either at the bottom, top, or in between. . . . We will go where the internal drive carries us like everybody else. It is up to the individual.”
Zora Neale Hurston
“The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia and of the Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single blacks flash like falling stars, and die sometimes before the world has rightly gauged their brightness.”
“Only in the case of the Negro has the melting pot failed to bring a minority into the full stream of American life”
John Fitzgerald Kennedy
