I’m most endeared to the fact that they used gifts and talents that were taught to them by other enterprising women who looked just like them. These are gifts and talents they brought with them from Africa and other distant shores. These were gifts and talents women used to appease their owners, and make their lives comfortable. These were gifts and talents used to fuel economies and for building communities. In one book I read, nickels from the sale of chicken eggs paid the college tuition of three children.

— Robin Caldwell

In 7.81 square miles of vaunted black community, the 850 square feet of Dum Donuts was the only place in the "community" where one could experience the Latin root of the word, where a citizen could revel in common togetherness. So one rainy Sunday afternoon, not long after the tanks and media attention had left, my father ordered his usual. He sat at the table nearest the ATM and said aloud, to no one in particular, "Do you know that the average household net worth for whites is $113,149 per year, Hispanics $6,325, and black folks $5,677?"" For real?"" What's your source material, nigger?"" The Pew Research Center." Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center, and hearing this, the concerned patrons turned around in their squeaky plastic seats as best they could, given that donut shop swivel chairs swivel only six degrees in either direction. Pops politely asked the manager to dim the lights. I switched on the overhead projector, slid a transparency over the glass, and together we craned our necks toward the ceiling, where a bar graph titled "Income Disparity as Determined by Race" hovered overhead like some dark, damning, statistical cumulonimbus cloud threatening to rain on our collective parades." I was wondering what that LI'l nigger was doing in a donut shop with a damn overhead projector.

— Paul Beatty

It began to strike me that the point of my education was a kind of discomfort, was the process that would not award me my own especial Dream but would break all the dreams, all the comforting myths of Africa, of America, and everywhere, and would leave me only with humanity in all its terribleness. And there was so much terrible out there, even among us. You must understand this.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

It is a beautiful thing to be on fire for justice… there is no greater joy than inspiring and empowering others––especially the least of these, the precious and priceless wretched of the earth!

— Cornel West

It is my deepest desire to share the worlds of people we don’t often see or read about in media. With my writing I seek to introduce you to the worlds I’ve always known existed around me and within me.

— Casey Curry

It is truly horrible to understand yourself as the essential below of your country. It breaks too much of what we would like to think about ourselves, our lives, the world we move through and the people who surround us. The struggle to understand is our only advantage over this madness.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

It’s important that young people know about the struggles we faced to get to the point we are today. Only then will they appreciate the hard-won freedom of blacks in this country.

— Amelia Boynton Robinson

I understand now that the only time black people don't feel guilty is when we've actually done something wrong, because that relieves us of the cognitive dissonance of being black and innocent, and in a way the prospect of going to jail becomes a relief.

— Paul Beatty

[I] would argue that native-born blacks are so vastly less "African" than actual Africans that calling ourselves 'African American' is not only illogical but almost disrespectful to African immigrants. Here are people who were born in Africa, speak African languages, eat African food, dance in African ways, remember African stories, and will spiritually always be a part of Africa -and we stand up and insist that we, too, are 'African' because Jesse Jackson said so?

— John McWhorter

I would not have you descend into your own dream. I would have you be a conscious citizen of this terrible and beautiful world.

— Ta-Nehisi Coates