Introduction -- 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.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.