Harry Belafonte Quotes

We should not be followers of traditions that go against human rights...we are human beings and we make traditions.

Most of all, I dislike this idea nowadays that if you're a black person in America, then you must be called African-American. Listen, I've visited Africa, and I've got news for everyone: I'm not an African.

Body and soul, Black America reveals the extreme questions of contemporary life, questions of freedom and identity: How can I be who I am?

It's important for youth, black youths particularly, to be able to fill in the blanks of themselves so they can know completely who they are, but also all the country to understand what this means: what the civil rights movement does to us as people. It is part of the journey that we must be on in order to become fully evolved human beings.

In 2016, the conversation of the black experience is so broad, and it's very raw. I mean, c'mon, we have a black president. That's a major thing, and there are so many other significant occurrences that have come from the '60s and '70s up to now.

I asked her if I was black or white. She replied "You are a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!

I was born black and female.

I'm African American / I'm African / I'm black as the moon.

I have one thing in common with the emerging black nations of Africa: We both have voices, and we are discovering what we can do with them.

Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. ... Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.

Race I've been studying since I knew there was a problem with race and that I was Black and something was wrong. Gender, is very new to me. All I can say is this is something that I'm going to take hold of and pray about it.

At this moment, then, the Negroes must begin to do the very thing which they have been taught that they cannot do.

They say African Americans. I say black people. I've only been to Africa once. I've been in America all my life!

There's been a sort of mini-revolution, an uprising, as was long overdue, about these subject matters: ethnicity and gender equality.

I always said if I lived to get grown and had a chance, I was going to try to get something for my mother and I was going to do something for the black man of the South if it would cost my life; I was determined to see that things were changed.

Kept looking for something to be in with. Follow someone's blueprint. But you have to be on your own.

You could easily play the guy as straight-up hood throughout the whole movie, the Imperial Courts, but writer and director Malik Vitthal envisioned a human being that has never been seen before in film: a black man in circumstances that he does not like, who is passionate - persistent - in turning it around.

You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.

Being alive and being a woman is all I got, but being colored is a metaphysical dilemma I haven't conquered yet.

The idea of voluntary segregation went against every value I had been taught. What did being born black have to do with excellence?

I love "Phenomenal Woman." The experiences she had of being African American in the U.S. - that itself is a task. I appreciate the hardships Maya Angelou went through for our generation. I'm super influenced by the black people that paved the way for us.

My seeking has been to explain and illuminate the Negro condition in America and obliquely that of all human kind.

The truth is, no man is white and no man is black. We are all freckled.

The correct rate of speed in innovating changes in long-standing social customs has not yet been determined by even the most expert of the experts. Personally I am beginning to think there is more danger in lagging than in speeding up cultural change to keep pace with mechanical change.

I might say this, that the problem of the, the solution for the Afro-American is two-fold - long-range and short-range.