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However the Southern man may have been master of the negro, there were compensatory processes whereby certain negroes were masters of their masters' children.

I'd like to state that Spike Lee is not saying that African American culture is just for black people alone to enjoy and cherish. Culture is for everybody.

I never ceased to be surprised when southern whites, at their homes or clubs, told racial jokes and spoke so derogatorily of blacks while longtime servants, for whom they quite clearly had some affection, were well within earshot.

Blacks have traditionally had to operate in a situation where whites have set themselves up as the custodians of the black experience.

There are still Negro elites. Many of them are obviously much richer, and perhaps a little more integrated into what remains a white power structure. But those old rituals from the social clubs, to the broadly segregated white and black schools, to an obsessive interest in ancestry, all of that does still exist. Look: we are a class-bound society.

Before the Civil War, the Negro was certainly as efficient a workman as the raw immigrant from Ireland or Germany. But, whereas the Irishmen found economic opportunity wide and daily growing wider, the Negro found public opinion determined to 'keep him in his place.'

The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.

All black Americans have slave names. They have white names; names that the slave master has given to them.

King thought he understood the white Southerner, having been born and reared in Georgia and trained a theologian.