color of skin Quotes

“She’s green, you mean. It’s a she, for heaven’s sake. ”

“He stood with her body in his arms in the silent room and cold facts battered him like waves sweeping in from the sea: she was dead; she was white; she was a woman; he had killed her; he was black; he might be caught; he did not want to be caught; if he were they would kill him. ”

“See, a marriage needs love. And God. And a little money. That’s all. The rest you can deal with. It’s not about black or white.”

“In running from her past, Mommy has created her own nation, a rainbow coalition.”

One afternoon on the way home from church I asked her whether God was black or white. A deep sigh. “Oh boy…God’s not black. He’s not white. He’s a spirit.” “Does he like black or white people better?” “He loves all people. He’s a spirit.” “What’s a spirit?” “A spirit’s a spirit.” “What color is God’s spirit?” “It doesn’t have a color,” she said. “God is the color of water. Water doesn’t have a color.”

“Mommy, after all, did not really look like me. In fact, she didn’t look like Richie, or David—or any of her children for that matter. We were all clearly black, of various shades of brown, some light brown, some medium brown, some very light-skinned, and all of us had curly hair. Mommy was by her own definition, “light-skinned,” a statement which I had initially accepted as fact but at some point later decided was not true.”

“I myself had no idea who I was. I loved my mother yet looked nothing like her. Neither did I look like the role models in my life—my stepfather, my godparents, other relatives—all of whom were black. And they looked nothing like the other heroes I saw, the guys in the movies, white men like Steve McQueen and Paul Newman who beat the bad guys and in the end got the pretty girl—who, incidentally, was always white.”

“Anyone who couldn’t understand that what’s important is a man’s soul, not the color of his skin, would never be content here.”

“Color is not a human or a personal reality; it is a political reality.”

″ When you make the choice to come to America, you become black. ”

″ I feel ... I have vegetables instead of ears, like large broccoli sticking out of my head. ”

“In all my years in the streets, I’d been looking at the exploitation that for the first time I really saw and understood.”

“Had a black boy announced that he aspired to be a writer, he would have been unhesitatingly called crazy by his pals. Or had a black boy spoken of yearning to get a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, his friends--in the boy’s own interest--would have reported his odd ambition to the white boss.”

“When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every tenement and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old spiritual, ‘Free at last, free at last. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.‘”

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by their character.”

“There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the colored citizen is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.”