Negro Culture Quotes

Why should I want to be white? I am a Negro - and beautiful!

Its roots are in American Negro culture, which is part of the whole country's heritage, but the dance speaks to everyone... Otherwise, it wouldn't work.

I proudly love being a Negro woman -- it's so involved and interesting.

Let the blare of Negro jazz bands and the bellowing voice of Bessie Smith sinking Blues penetrate the closed ears of the colored near-intellectuals until they listen and perhaps understand.

Among Negroes it is a bad omen when someone knocks on the door of a house where a person has died.

The background of the Negro culture is voodoo and magic; and the purposes the magic are control and power over God, man, nature and society. Voodoo and magic was the religion and life of America's Negro.

I found a special eagerness among the younger, and I am sorry to say, the more intelligent Negroes, to dismiss the spiritual as something beneath their new pride in their race. It is as if they wanted to put it behind them as something to be ashamed of.

I took care of my wheel as one would look after a Rolls Royce. If it needed repairs I always brought it to the same shop on Myrtle Avenue run by a negro named Ed Perry. He handled the bike with kid gloves, you might say. He would always see to it that neither front nor back wheel wobbled. Often he would do a job for me without pay, because, as he put it, he never saw a man so in love with his bike as I was.

She's got those big black eyes with plenty shiny white in them that makes them shine like brand new money and she knows what God gave women eyelashes for, too. Her hair is not what you might call straight. It's negro hair, but it's got a kind of white flavor. Like the piece of string out of a ham. It's not ham at all, but it's been around ham and got the flavor.

I am not afraid of European influences. The point is to use them, as Ellington did, as part of my life as an American Negro.

America is deeply rooted in Negro culture: its colloquialisms; its humor; its music.

But I dig Negroes. I dig them all the way.

The Negro and all things negroid had become a fad, and Harlem had become a shrine to which feverish pilgrimages were in order . . . Seventh Avenue was the gorge into which Harlem cliff dwellers crowded to promenade.

Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their 'white' culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work.

Because of the generation in which I came into the world, there were expectations. Of course there were expectations. It was something having to do with being a respectable Negro woman who would make the people in Baltimore proud.

The 'civil rights' revolutionary groups are a case in point. Their goal is not equality but power. The background of Negro culture is African and magic, and the purposes of magic are control and power. . . Voodoo or magic was the religion and life of American Negroes. Voodoo songs underlie jazz, and old voodoo, with its power goal, has been merely replaced with revolutionary voodoo, a modernized power drive.

At lilac evening I walked with every muscle aching among the lights of 27th and Welton in the Denver colored section, wishing I were a Negro, feeling that the best the white world had offered was not enough ecstasy for me, not enough life, joy, kicks, darkness, music, not enough night.

The Negro is an exotic of the most gorgeous and superb countries of the world, and he has deep in his heart a passion for all that is splendid, rich and fanciful.

In such places as Greenwich Village, a menage-a-trois was completed- the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.

It is pretty well settled that the city is the Negro's great contribution to civilization, for it was in Africa where the first cities grew up.

The music [of America] must be founded upon what are called the negro melodies …. These beautiful and varied themes are the product of the soil. They are American.

Negro music and culture are intrinsically improvisational, existential. Nothing is sacred. After a decade, a musical idea, no matter how innovative, is threatened.

My writing has been largely concerned with the depicting of Negro life in America.