African American Culture Quotes

My father is Nigerian; my mother is from Texas and African-American. My father was the first in his family to go to university. He flew from Nigeria to Los Angeles in the '70s to go to UCLA, where he met my mother. They broke up before I was born, and he returned to Nigeria.

You get below the Mason-Dixon line and you have some of the best music, culture, the two races, the literature, and it's so rich.

I remember back in the day when Chuck D called hip-hop the 'black people's CNN.' Well now, hip-hop is more like Fox News. It's biased, and highly suspect.

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.

Everybody that you could name would join in our audiences from, Laguardia on down. Everybody came. Everybody came to the Cotton Club.

A lot of people don't know, but I love soul food. I love fried chicken and pork chops, all of that.

When I did 'Baby Got Back,' that was just a reflection of the African-American community. We've always liked curves, and a lot of people misunderstood it because let's face it: 20 years prior to 'Baby Got Back,' the only images you saw of a black woman on television were she was probably 300 pounds and cleaning the house with a rag on her head.

You have Vampire Weekend who have more African references musically than most African-American artists.

I'm from Harlem, born and raised there.

Well, you know, the original banjos were all handmade instruments. Gourd - it would be made with gourds and whatever, you know, materials would have been around. And, you know, first hundred years of its existence, the banjo's known as a plantation instrument, as a black instrument, you know?

The Washington black community was able to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. I mean, we had our own newspapers, our own restaurants, our own theaters, our own small shops, our own clubs, our own Masonic lodges.

I was always drawn to gospel music and the roots of African-American music. It's the foundation of rock and roll.

My influences have been what I call my four Bs - the primary one being the blues, then Borges, Baraka, and Bearden.

I think it was just an opera. Now, you go to opera, you expect to see and hear what the opera is. So, it was Catfish Row. It was singers. Marvelous voices. It didn't make no difference what color they were.

When I first started comedy, me and my friends were kids. I claim - although I know that it's a spurious and probably untrue claim - that we were the first generation of kids to act black.

We're blues people. And blues never lets tragedy have the last word.

As I got older, I really got into Tupac's poetry, his books and just learning about his life and what he was into.

Writing 'Native Guard,' I didn't know I was working on a single book. I began writing that book because I was interested in the lesser-known history of these black soldiers stationed off the coast of my hometown.

My favorite movie is 'Coming to America' by Eddie Murphy.

You literally cannot deny the fact that rock and roll was born because of blues, and blues is black man's music.

As Africans Americans we often think about the tragic stories associated with our lineage, but there are a lot of triumphs. Traveling helps you learn about other aspects of our history, like the story of Christ the Redeemer. It's empowering and inspiring.

It was a time after 'Lady Sings the Blues' and 'Mahogany' and all those romantic movies: I became this romantic figure on the street in a very special way.

You see a lot of Baptist churches in Harlem, you see a lot of the same kind of cuisine, the soul food - there's a lot of places that remind you of its southern roots.