Brian Stelfreeze Quotes

The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.

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

The history of the black man did not begin with slavery.

Negro President

My own thinking has evolved. You find Africanisms in American speech. You find an African influence on United States culture. There are all kinds of Africanisms in America, as you would expect, if you really thought about it... That whole thing is much broader; the influence is much broader than I first understood.

The 22 million or 30 million, whatever the case may be, Afro-Americans in the United States were still Africans.

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

When we say Afro American, we include everyone in the Western Hemisphere of African descent. South America is America. Central America is America. South America has many people in it of African descent.

Black culture has been a huge influence in my life.

There's no question that I'm African-American. OK? I'm a black man. We're not going to escape that.

Then it was that the exports of slaves from Virginia and the Carolinas was so great that the population of those States remained almost, if not quite stationary.

American music culture is black culture.

I am proud of my black roots and of the black blood that runs in my veins.

I do consider myself part of black history.

Let not the 12 million Negroes be ashamed of the fact that they are the grandchildren of slaves. There is dishonor in being slave-owners.

I think all in all, one thing a lot of plays seem to be saying is that we need to, as black Americans, to make a connection with our past in order to determine the kind of future we're going to have. In other words, we simply need to know who we are in relation to our historical presence in America.

My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South.

There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

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

Jimmy Baldwin was not only a writer, an international literary figure: he was a man, spirit, voice - old and black and terrible as that first ancestor.

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

My grandfather on my paternal side, Richard Frazier, was born in the late 1850s and, therefore, was born into slavery but was a sharecropper in South Carolina for his entire life.

My knowledge of my ancestry, like a lot of black people not living in Africa today, is very vague.

I am proud to be black man.

Not only did I always know I was black, I always knew we were and are beautiful, culturally rich, and creators of everything from the sciences to the arts.