Archie Shepp Quotes

When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers.

The tragedy of the civil rights movement is that just as it achieved the beginning of the end of racial segregation, white educated elites became swept up in the glamour of the sexual revolution.

The Twist was a guided missile launched from the ghetto into the heart of suburbia. The Twist succeeded, as politics, religion and law could never do, in writing in the heart and soul what the Supreme Court could only write on the books.

At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement.

People and poets are marching together. Art is henceforth on a popular footing in the arena with the masses.

My parents grew up during the Harlem renaissance.

I think that N.W.A. picked up where Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King would have gone if they hadn't been assassinated.

For me, the bold jazz of John Coltrane and Miles Davis reflected the bold attitude in African-Americans finding their political identity and voice.

When the world becomes a massive mess with nobody at the helm, it's time for artists to make their mark.

And I don't expect anyone can bring about a revolution in the way that Bob Dylan did - and really didn't - in the 1960s.

I wanted to start a revolution, using art to build the sort of society I myself envisioned.

I've got personal views on the '60s. You can't have freedom without paying the price for it.

I really do believe that art changes the landscape of the world.

Soul lyrics, soul music came at about the same time as the civil rights movement, and it's very possible that one influenced the other.

In the seventies, a group of American artists seized the means not of production but of reproduction. They tore apart visual culture at a time of no money, no market, and no one paying attention except other artists. Vietnam and Watergate had happened; everything in America was being questioned.

I will revolutionise art and the world. Hurrah!

I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience.

Students in the '60s were responsible for great changes, politically and socially.

From 1940 to the present, the art world - and particularly Los Angeles - has undergone a transformation not unlike the Italian Renaissance.

The great triumph of the Sixties was to dramatize just how arbitrary and constructed the seeming normality of the Fifties had been. We rose up from our maple-wood twin beds and fell onto the great squishy, heated water bed of the Sixties.

As far as I can tell, 1968 is a year about change, about revolution, about violence, about people turning inwards as community breaks down.

A lot of people think that the music was responsible for a lot of changes in the Sixties, but I think the music came out of it. The music wouldn't have happened without the social changes.

These young people have to know that Dr. King and others made it possible for them to do their Hip Hopping.

Around 2008 was a really special time culturally. There were a lot of cool things going on in music, in fashion, politically. It was a really hopeful time and a really creative time.

All art is propaganda, and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda.