Donald Byrd Quotes

I love 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X.' That was like the only black book we read in high school.

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.

The name James Baldwin had been around the house for as long as I could remember and meant almost as much as that of Martin Luther King.

My parents grew up during the Harlem renaissance.

O Black and unknown bards of long ago, How came your lips to touch the sacred fire?

I told my father I had to try political science for a year. He thought I was throwing my life away.

We must canonize our own saints, create our own martyrs … black men and women who have made their distinct contributions to our racial history.

Lift Every Voice and Sing

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 got into medicine at university, then deferred a year to see. Then I started acting and just never went back to university.

Typically, there's this perspective among writers - and black writers: there's this idea that there is one person - and maybe beyond writers - among blacks, there is always one person who everyone should go to learn about all things black.

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.

I've had the career experience. I've had the experience of taking care of myself. I'm going to college because I genuinely want to learn.

Being working class, my parents thought, 'Ian's going to uni, the first in the family,' and I'd do dentistry or accountancy. I was going to do accountancy; then I got a C in Economics and thought, 'Why am I doing this?' The only thing I was interested in was books and literature.

Maya Angelou was the voice of three generations. Her poetry spanned our journey, chronicled our hearts and documented our struggles as we moved from the orations of Martin Luther King to the presidency of Barack Obama.

I found poetry at 12 and 13 and, lo and behold, learned that my attorney father had a background in poetry - as he wore dashikis and Afros in the '70s and named his kids Arabic names. He was a poet and a lot like The Last Poets and Gil Scott-Heron and all of these folks. He definitely was an artist.

I didn't plan on going to college, at least not a full-time schedule. I still have that plan. I may take some individual classes at some point as an indulgence.

I definitely want to continue being an actress. I love it. The reason I'm going to college is because I do want knowledge in another field. College isn't the college experience for me. I'm not going to be in a sorority. I'm not going to network. I'm not even really going to make my lifelong friends.

I was an English major in college who concentrated in African-American literature and culture. So I read quite a few slave narratives and stories of escape, and I grew up in Ohio, which was a common stop on the Underground Railroad.

When my father finished his Ph.D., my mother went back for another bachelor's degree, this time in environmental science.

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.

I am proud to be black man.

To be at the forefront of something that can spark a major change as far as kids going to an HBCU and learning about our history and learning about our culture and learning about our ancestors, where we came from - that's a big thing, that's a really big thing.