Maya Angelou quotes about race & the color line

Every person under the sound of my voice is a soldier. You are either fighting for your freedom or betraying the fight for freedom or enlisted in the army to deny somebody else's freedom.

Since you're black, you have to hope for the best. Be prepared for the worst and always know that anything can happen.

I know now that until the lowliest Negro sharecropper in the South is free, I am not free.

Black people are letting white Americans know that the time is coming for ballots or bullets.

all I had to do, really had to do, was stay black and die. Nothing could be more interesting than the first, or more permanent than the latter.

Sister, in this country a Negro is always about to get killed, so that ain't nothing. But you tell your husband that a black man was ready to lay down his life for you. That's all.

most black revolutionaries, most black radicals, most black activists, do not really want change. They want exchange.

The root cause of racism and its primary result is that whites refuse to see us simply as people.

I came from a race used to violence and habituated to loss.

Permit? If we left it to you whites we'd be in the same shape as our folks in South Africa. We'd have to have a permit to breathe.

I'll put my foot in that door up to my hip until women of every color can walk over my foot, get in that union, get aboard a ship and go to sea.

Everything in this society is geared to keeping a black boy from growing to manhood. You've got to let him try for himself.

Georgia is Down South. California is Up South. If you're black in this country, you're on a plantation.

I deserved everything beautiful and I merited putting my long black feet on Oriental carpets as much as Lady Astor.

Trying to overcome was black people's honorable tradition.

They shot me and said my fighting days were over, but if I am paralyzed and can only lift my eyelids, I will stare the white oppressors out of Africa.

We, the most hated, must take hate into our hands and by the miracle of love, turn loathing into love.

Anyway, if more Africans had eaten more missionaries, the Continent would be in better shape.

Oh, but we knew them with the intimacy of a surgeon's scalpel.

We, in Kenya, are women, not just wombs. We have shown during Mau Mau that we have ideas as well as babies.

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

But still, like dust, I’ll rise.

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide

You may write me down in history