David Alan Grier Quotes

Our ears are saluted from the east and west, north and south alike saying: I like a Negro in his place. But there are no two communities which agree as to his proper place. So they have been trying to fix him in first one place and then in another; but just as soon as public sentiment changed, or he saw an opportunity, he changed to such places as he thought his intelligence, industry, courage and endurance commanded.

My only crime was being born black - or being born black in Alabama.

The Negro fought and bled and died in every war the white man waged, and he still won't give you justice. You nursed his baby and cleaned behind his wife, and he still won't give you freedom; you turned the other cheek while he lynched you and raped your women, but he still won't give you equality.

So now I'm going to forget the 400 years of lynching and killing raping and depriving my people feeding of justice and equality and the lowest of low last respect and I'm going to look at two or three white people who are trying to do right and don't see the other million who are trying to kill me? I'm not that big of a fool.

The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

To be black and conscious in America is to be in a constant state of rage.

The prejudice was so bad in the United States at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit there, and the food would never come.

I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.

I also know that while I am black I am a human being, and therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people didn't know that. Every time I tried to go into a place they stopped me.

The man does not beat your head because you got a Cadillac or because you got a Ford; he beats you because you're black!

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

The American imagination has never been able to fully recover from its white-supremacist beginnings.

There's always some kind of blacklist throughout history. But the difference is, in America they usually let you live.

The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.

Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.

When George Washington and the others created U. S. independence, they did not free the slaves; not long ago, a U. S. black athlete could not play baseball in the major leagues. And yet you called yours the freest country in the world.

You complain that Negroes are a base class. Who makes and keeps the Jew or the Negro base, who but you, who exclude them from the rights which others enjoy?

Why can a Communist eat at a lunch counter in Selma, Alabama while a Black American veteran cannot?

You may set the Negro free, but you cannot make him otherwise than an alien to the European.

Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights were turning the Constitution into a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.

No Negro, mulatto, or Indian shall from and after the publication of this act bear any office ecclesiastical, civil or military, or be in any place of public trust or power, within this her majesty's colony and dominion of Virginia

Martin Luther King Jr. could have argued that separate water fountains were too expensive, a waste of money. He would have been right about that. But cost was beside the point.

I can't stop thinking about the devaluation of black life, and I find it seeping into everything I write.

I think that, for so much of our matriculation through American society, black people sort of feel like outsiders.