Maya Angelou Quotes

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

We must treat the disease of racism. This means we must understand the disease.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

If acknowledging that racial misgivings and misunderstandings are still a part of politics and life in America, I plead guilty.

To the great majority of white Americans, the Negro problem has distinctly negative connotations. It suggests something difficult to settle and equally difficult to leave alone. It is embarrassing. It makes for moral uneasiness.

I have the utmost respect and 'aloha' for black people - who have already suffered so much due to racial discrimination and acts of hatred.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

As an African-American, I know all too well the negative thoughts and feelings hatred and bigotry cause.

For generations, even many otherwise decent white Southerners learned to despise black people.

In spite of what some people claim, we are not in a post-racial era. I think it's still an important issue to bring up.

It's hard to say when or if we will actually arrive at that place called 'post-racial', or, better yet, post-racism.

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

The worst disease from which the society of our nation suffers is ... the treatment of the Negro.

Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored—it is a shadow over all of us.

All God’s dangers ain’t White men.

The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger.

Although the race problem may seem to lie dormant at times, it continually exists, lives on and on and sometimes rages with all the fury of a jungle beast. It gnaws at the very vitals of our existence, in time it will sap our strength and destroy the greatness of our American way of life unless solved properly and permanently.

It’s a sordid business this divvying us up by race.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

There's a little racism out here, always was, and always will be.

I'm hoping that somehow with songs like 'American Gold' there will be some kind of justice, and people just stop being so close-minded to where they're like, 'Oh, it's not race.' It's easy to say that when you're not black and you haven't experienced it.

Although slavery may have been abolished, the crippling poison of racism still persists, and the struggle still continues.

Civil rights in this country is unfinished business, and racism is alive and well.

On any given day, there's always something I'd rather be doing than facing the ugly, racist underbelly of America.

Being black in America - especially as I was growing up - the feeling of oppression, the feeling of being outcast, the feeling of not having a voice was part of my life.