The Negro, however, has been tested on an extensive scale.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
We do not show the Negro how to overcome segregation, but we teach him how to accept it as final and just.
I often wonder whether Negroes like myself who are pretty well known help out at all in breaking down barriers.
It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.
In disposition the Negro is joyous, flexible, and indolent; while the many nations which compose this race present a singular diversity of intellectual character, of which the far extreme is the lowest grade of humanity.
I know no national boundary where the Negro is concerned. The whole world is my province until Africa is free.
Like any group that has endured much, African Americans have created a strong and mutually reinforcing sense of group identity. That's not a bad thing in and of itself.
It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.
If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.
The American Negro never can be blamed for his racial animosities - he is only reacting to 400 years of the conscious racism of the American whites.
Negroes are human beings with exactly the same faults and virtues as members of the other races.