African Quotes

459 Sourced quotes

New Orleans is of such key importance to American music because historical factors combined to make it the strongest center of African musical practice in the United States, and, cliches aside, that practice really did travel up the Mississippi and did spread overland.

Son, you are in the house of generations. Every African who lives in America has a part of his soul in this ark. God has called you, and I shall anoint you.

To my knowledge, no progressive educator has ever suggested that children didn't need to know the "mere facts" about the contributions of African Americans to our society.

The African leopard is an audacious animal, although it is ungrateful of me to say a word against him, after the way he has let me off personally... taken as a whole, he is the most lovely animal I have ever seen; only seeing him, in the one way you can gain a full idea of his beauty, namely in his native forest, is not an unmixed joy to a person, like myself, of a nervous disposition.

What are we going to say if tomorrow it occurs to some African state to send its agents into Mississippi and to kidnap one of the leaders of the segregationist movement there? And what are we going to reply if a court in Ghana or the Congo quotes the Eichmann case as precedent?

As the drum stands at the crossroads of traditional African and Afro-American culture, so the poet should stand at the center of the drum... And poetry is music's twin. Both the metaphysical and the metaphorical word stem from and return to the drum: life, love, birth, and death labored out in measured rumble or anxious cacophony.

Eugene B. Redmond

Acquired characteristics cannot be inherited, and... within a species every member is born in the essential image of the first of its kind. African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man

The artist has always functioned in African society, as the record of the mores and experiences of his society and as the voice of vision in his own time. It is time for him to respond to this essence of himself.

I believe in Africa for the African, white and black, and I believe in America for the Americans, native, naturalized and all colors—and I believe that any of these Americans would be foolish to give up their citizenship for a thousand-year improbability in Africa or anywhere else.

William Pickens

Everybody knows there is absolutely no difference between the native African and the American and West Indian Negro, in that we are descendant of one common family stock. It is only a matter of accident that we have been divided and kept apart... but it is felt that when the time has come for us to get back together, we shall do so in the spirit of brotherly love.

As CNN saw our growth in African-American viewership, they affirmed a fundamental truth of news coverage - people will watch you if they see themselves in what you report. It doesn't hurt if the people doing the reporting look like them, too.

Soledad O'Brien

Danced healing rituals (in African village compounds, temple courtyards, dance-therapy studios, public theaters, and other social settings) reinvoke old traumas for exorcism and the transformation of fear, convince people that evil is gone or possible to dissipate, and reaffirm communal solidarity and a sense of well-being.

Judith Lynne Hanna

Or maybe it's time to broaden out some of the African civil wars?

You will find a blacker world on death row than anywhere else. African-Americans, a mere 11 percent of the national population, compose about 40 percent of the death row population. There, too, you will find this writer.

Mumia Abu-Jamal

Those who tell you that the territorial question is an abstraction, that you can never colonize another territory without the African slavetrade, are both deaf and blind to the history of the last sixty years.

This I know for a fact: the reason African women have children is so that there's someone else to do the housework.

Ben Aaronovitch

We still have too many Americans who give in to their fears of those who are different from them. Not so long ago, swastikas were painted on the doors of some African-American members of our Special Forces at Ft. Bragg. They are special forces. They do not deserve to have swastikas on their doors.

I care not whether the soldiers are of Milesian, Teutonic, African or Angelo-Saxon descent. I despise the principle that make a difference between them in the hour of battle and of death.

Thaddeus Stevens

Those who professed themselves unable to believe in the reality of human progress ought to cheer themselves up, as the students under examination had conceivably been cheered up, by a short study of the Middle Ages. The hydrogen bomb, the South African Government, Chioang Kaidick, Senator McCarthy himself, would then seem a light price to pay for no longer being in the Middle Ages.

In some respects, South African apartheid was more vicious than Israeli practices, and in some respects the opposite is true.

African-American women seldom do just what we want to do but always do what we have to do.

Deep down, if we really accept that their lives - African lives - are equal to ours, we would all be doing more to put the fire out. Its an uncomfortable truth.

African rights and liberty is a subject that ought to fire the breast of every free man of color in these United States, and excite in his bosom a lively, deep, decided and heart-felt interest.

Maria W. Stewart

I don't know what causes the upset when it's stated that for the most part people of Jewish ancestry run the entertainment industry. This is not an indictment, and it's not a moral judgment. It's like saying the National Basketball Association is made up mostly of African Americans.

As humourless a lump of dough as ever held a torchlight vigil outside the South African Embassy or stuck an AIDS awareness ribbon on an unwilling first-nighter.