A Quote by Henry Louis Gates

My grandfather was coloured, my father was Negro, and I am Black.

Henry Louis Gates

Quote Topics

Am Black Father Grandfather My Grandfather

Quote Author

Henry Louis Gates
American - Critic
Born: September 16, 1950

What I am is a father, a grandfather, a great grandfather, and an artist. I am a man who loves his people and wants to go home.

Leonard Peltier

I am a Negro: Black as the night is black, Black like the depths of my Africa.

Langston Hughes

Black! Black! Black! I am proud of being a Negro. Nor have I ever tried to beg tolerance from anyone. Superiority is not proved by color, but by the brain, by education, by willpower, by moral courage.

Jose Celso Barbosa

I am colored but I offer nothing in the way of extenuating circumstances except the fact that I am the only Negro in the United States whose grandfather on the mother's side was not an Indian chief.

Zora Neale Hurston

My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. 'Coloured' is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.

Peter Abrahams

I know my grandfather drank occasionally socially, what we call "taking a sip." And my father never touched the bottle. He condemned my grandfather for doing that, and his punishment to his father was when my grandfather came to visit him from Georgia, he would not allow my grandfather to preach in his church.Even though my classmates very often drank alcohol in my presence and they would try and get me to join in, I felt, no, I didn't need that.

David C. Driskell

Instead of the Negro leaders having the black man begging for a chance to - to dine in white restaurants, the Negro leader should be showing the black man how to do something to strengthen his own economy.

Malcolm X

The street is as diverse as any other sector, but in peoples' mind it gets appropriated as a black man who's tough. Trying to make it through by staying hard and phallocentric. To me, that is just an impoverished conception of what it is to be a black male. It doesn't do justice to my grandfather, my father, my brother - or just the black men I grew up with.

Cornel West

Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Do you know that there are libraries in our country that will not stock a book by a Negro writer, not even as a gift? There are towns where Negro newspapers and magazines cannot be sold except surreptitiously. There are American magazines that have never published anything by Negroes. There are film studios that have never hired a Negro writer. Censorship for us begins at the color line.

Langston Hughes

Dear White Fella When I am born I’m black When I grow up I’m black When I am sick I’m black When I go out ina sun I’m black When I git cold I’m black When I git scared I’m black And when I die I’m still black. But you white fella When you’re born you’re pink When you grow up you’re white When you git sick you’re green When you go out ina sun you go red When you git cold you go blue When you git scared you’re yellow And when you die you’re grey And you got the cheek to call me coloured?

Steven Pinker

Negro blood is sure powerful, because just one drop of black blood makes a colored man. One drop--you are a Negro! . . . Black is powerful.

Langston Hughes

There is this image of a guy in a hot tub, drinking champagne with two buxom blondes. But that is not the real me. I am a father, and I am a grandfather, too.

Robin Leach

I maintain that I have been a Negro three times--a Negro baby, a Negro girl and a Negro woman. Still, if you have received no clear cut impression of what the Negro in America is like, then you are in the same place with me. There is no The Negro here. Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!

Zora Neale Hurston

I adore my black skin and my kinky hair. The Negro hair is more educated than the white man's hair. Because with Negro hair, where you put it, it stays. It's obedient. The hair of the white, just give one quick movement, and it's out of place. It won't obey. If reincarnation exists I want to come back black.