Darryl Pinckney Quotes

To me, Harlem is one of the most important places on the earth, particularly when it comes to talking about African Americans.

As a child, I experienced black culture as many people did in America: on the TV, radio, and stages.

I'm sort of obsessed with Harlem. Just its history. My father did the music for a play called 'The Huey P. Newton Story,' and they did a lot of work in Harlem. So as a little girl, I spent a lot of time in Harlem Library.

American music culture is black culture.

I think the blues is the best literature that we as blacks have created since we've been here. I call it our 'sacred book.' What I've attempted to do is to mine that field, to mine those cultural ideas and attitudes and give them to my characters.

In the imagination, Harlem will always be the spiritual capital of black excellence in America.

Slaves and the descendants of slaves created world pop culture. Let's keep it real and be very respectful about that.

As Africans Americans we often think about the tragic stories associated with our lineage, but there are a lot of triumphs. Traveling helps you learn about other aspects of our history, like the story of Christ the Redeemer. It's empowering and inspiring.

Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.

As yet, the Negroes themselves do not fully appreciate these old slave songs.

The music [of America] must be founded upon what are called the negro melodies …. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American.

There is a distinctive African American culture that has roots in Africa and evolved on American soil.

I would love to do an anthology show based on the character of Jesse B. Semple that Langston Hughes wrote about. He's sort of a Forrest Gump character in the midst of 20th century Harlem.

I wanted to explore black culture, and I wanted that culture to be a revelation.

Art is a form of experience of the person, the place, the history of the people, and as black people, we are different. We hail from Africa to America, so the culture is mixed, from the African to the American. We can't drop that. It's reflected in the music, the dance, the poetry, and the art.

I viewed black musicals before 'Jelly' as a form of cultural strip mining. The exterior remained, but all the culture that signified where the people had come from and their connection to the earth was absent.

All black art is always judged to illuminate our experience and prove that our stories and our history and our lives matter. And that goes back to Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston - take your pick.

There is no monolithic black culture. It's completely different for someone born in Harlem to someone born in Houston or London with one exception, which is that people contributing to black culture have the experience of being black.

Black History Month could focus less on slavery and civil rights and more on the Harlem Renaissance and everything we have achieved. I want to know about the whole black experience.

Harlem is filled with moments of history.

Hold those things that tell your history and protect them. During slavery, who was able to read or write or keep anything? The ability to have somebody to tell your story to is so important. It says: 'I was here. I may be sold tomorrow. But you know I was here.'

My mother introduced me to more academic-minded writers, Cornel West and Skip Gates. In her library, I came across, when I was very young, Harold Cruse's 'The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual,' which is like a bible of Negro intellectuals from Frederick Douglass to Amiri Baraka.

There are a great many colored people who are ashamed of the cake-walk, but I think they ought to be proud of it.

In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.

Jazz came to America three hundred years ago in chains.