I learned about poise and dignity, and I learned about what it means to be an African-American in television and what that requires in terms of what kind of position you take for yourself and how you define your own reality in a world that is still finding its footing, to say the least.
If you have money and you have fame, but you don't have any confidence in your blackness, then it's all for nothing.
The Black skin is not a badge of shame, but rather a glorious symbol of national greatness.
The appeal of conservatism is the mutuality it asserts between individual and political freedom, its beautiful idea of a free man in a free society. And it offers minorities the one thing they can never get from liberalism: human rather than racial dignity.
I would risk violence a thousand times rather than risk the emasculation of the whole race.
I leave you love. I leave you hope. I leave you the challenge of developing confidence in one another. I leave you respect for the use of power. I leave you faith. I leave you racial dignity.
It slaps your dignity just right. I loved the idea of these proud, dignified black men, and I saw the older ones wounded, and it wounded me ten times as much because I couldn't stand seeing them hurt like this.
I achieved too little result from my principal task, the task of making my race a race that is respected, a race that is honourable, a race that is highly regarded.
I want my portraits to create a space where blackness can breathe.
I might add how in the world can you say, or can anyone say, that it will dignify the American Negro to beg in or wade [?] in or plead in when the people in Hungary didn't beg in? They were freedom fighters. And they fought for their freedom.
