Black Boy Quotes

• Black boys became criminalized. I was in constant dread for their lives, because they were targets everywhere. They still are.

  Toni Morrison

  Fear, Boys, Black

  35 Copy quote

• I guess cause i'm black boy, I'm supposed to say 'peace', sing songs, and get capped on.

  Tupac Shakur

  Song, Boys, Rapper

  Song: Holler If Ya' Hear Me

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• As a young black boy, it made me proud to see black leaders that did something amazing and made the world change.

  John Legend

  Boys, Leader, Black

  "Singer-songwriter John Legend". "Tavis Smiley Show", www.pbs.org. February 9, 2011.

  7 Copy quote

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• What age is a black boy when he learns he's scary?

  Jonathan Lethem

  Boys, Scary, Black

  Jonathan Lethem (2004). “The Fortress of Solitude”, p.490, Vintage

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• I've been in situations where I was 'black boy white,' or 'white boy black.' People didn't know, "Is he the whitest black person in the world or is he the blackest white person in the world?"

  Kevin michael

  Boys, White, People

  Source: www.djbooth.net

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• I, with millions of other Americans, have the same dream Martin Luther King Jr. had; when I wake up I wish some of the things I dreamt would be true. I wish that little black and white boys and girls would hold hands without being shocked at their nearness to each other and say in a natural way, "we have overcome.

  Maya Angelou

  Girl, Dream, Kings

  FaceBook post by Maya Angelou from Aug 28, 2013

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• I was a very poor young black boy in New Orleans, just a face without a name, swimming in a sea of poverty trying to survive.

  Tyler Perry

  Swimming, Boys, New Orleans

  7 Copy quote

• We send young white boys to the Army. We're sending young black boys to the prisons.

  Talib Kweli

  Army, Boys, Black

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• I have a dream that one day little black boys and girls will be holding hands with little white boys and girls.

  Martin Luther King, Jr.

  Girl, Dream, Boys

  18 Copy quote

• Ah, Christ, I love you rings to the wild sky
  And I must think a little of the past:
  When I was ten I told a stinking lie
  That got a black boy whipped.

  Allen Tate

  Christmas, Lying, Love You

  Allen Tate (2014). “Collected Poems, 1919-1976”, p.103, Macmillan

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• That's the trouble with, I think, my - the contemporary read of my work. So many people just simply say, "These are pretty pictures of black boys." They're not really thinking about, like, what the whole thing is.

  Kehinde Wiley

  Thinking, Boys, People

  Source: www.aaa.si.edu

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• Then began an experience that turned my life around-working on a book with a black kid as hero. None of the manuscripts I'd been illustrating featured any black kids-except for token blacks in the background. My book would have him there simply because he should have been there all along. Years before I had cut from a magazine a strip of photos of a little black boy. I often put them on my studio walls before I'd begun to illustrate children's books. I just loved looking at him. This was the child who would be the hero of my book.

  Ezra Jack Keats

  Children, Wall, Book

  35 Copy quote

• Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness

  Richard Wright

  Lonely, Self, White

  Richard Wright (2010). “American Hunger”, p.15, Harper Collins

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• I've had this sensibility since I was a child. If there was a black boy in the school, I was the friend. If there was an effeminate guy, I was the friend. If there was somebody who was poor like me, I was the friend.

  Riccardo Tisci

  Children, School, Boys

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.

  Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Teenage, Pregnancy, Boys

  "School as Wonder, or Way Out" by Ta-Nehisi Coates, www.nytimes.com. July 10, 2012.

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• It made me love talk that sought answers to questions that could help nobody, that could only keep alive in me that enthralling sense of wonder and awe in the face of the drama of human feeling which is hidden by the external drama of life.

  Richard Wright

  Drama, Feelings, Answers

  Richard Wright (1945). “Black boy: a record of childhood and youth”

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• We know what happens to little black boys that have no dads; we've heard that, we get it. But no one is really saying that young women who are born without fathers have real serious issues especially when their mother had no father and the mother has issues.

  Karrine Steffans

  Mother, Dad, Father

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• Reinvigorating the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, making sure that in our Department of Education, where we see evidence of black boys being suspended at substantially higher rates than white boys for the same behavior, in the absence of that kind of rigorous enforcement of the nondiscrimination principle, then the long-standing biases that I believe have weakened, but are still clearly present in our society, assert themselves in ways that usually disadvantage African Americans.

  Barack Obama

  Believe, Boys, Rights

  Source: www.theatlantic.com

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• Part of what I am dealing with, with this blackness, is asking the question, "Where are those black people, who are as dark as the description of a young black boy that Solomon Northup gives in 12 Years A Slave?" He describes the young black 14-year-old boy as "blacker than any crow." You have to question if he is using that metaphorically or as a descriptive?

  Kerry James Marshall

  Dark, Boys, Years

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

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• Bodybuilding has been the tool that single-handedly taught a little black boy from the projects to use his mind to achieve success. it taught me to see things for what they can be. I had 17-inch arms; I imagined them to be 24 inches. The power of my mind allowed me to achieve what I imagined.

  Kai Greene

  Boys, Bodybuilding, Mind

  27 Copy quote

• When you look at me you don't immediately imagine a very very glamorous icon, so it's only in the theater that I get to do these experiments. I've been an actor about 51 years now. I've played everything from an 8-year-old black boy to a 72-year-old French matriarch, and they hardly hire you to do that on TV.

  Tyne Daly

  Boys, Years, Icons

  4 Copy quote

• When Michael Jackson, a poor black boy who grew up to be a rich, white woman, married Elvis Presley's daughter the Scientologist. Makes you proud to be an American, dudn't it?

  Molly Ivins

  Daughter, Boys, White

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• In some states, not even 50 percent of black boys finish high school.

  Tavis Smiley

  School, Boys, Black

  "Education an economic issue?". "Meet the Press" with David Gregory, www.nbcnews.com. September 25, 2011.

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• In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.

  Benjamin E. Mays

  Art, Boys, White

  Benjamin E. Mays (2011). “Born to Rebel: An Autobiography”, p.22, University of Georgia Press

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• There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.

  Arthur Ashe

  Powerful, Boys, Virginia

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