Quotes about Empowerment

Don't let anybody, anybody convince you this is the way the world is and therefore must be. It must be the way it ought to be.

She needed what most colored girls needed: a chorus of mamas, grandmamas, aunts, cousins, sisters, neighbors, Sunday school teachers, best girl friends, and what all to give her the strength life demanded of her—and the humor with which to live it.

It was lovely. Not to be stared at, not seen, but being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other.

Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to be and stay what I was [...] School teacher changed me. I was something else and that something else was less than a chicken sitting in the sun on a tub. (Paul D.)

Well, feel this, why don't you? Feel how it feels to have a bed to sleep in and somebody there not worrying you to death about what you got to do each day to deserve it. Feel how that feels. And if that don't get it, feel how it feels to be a colored woman roaming the roads with anything God made liable to jump on you. Feel that.

Beloved, you are my sister, you are my daughter, you are my face; you are me.

A good man is a good thing, but there is nothing in the world better than a good woman. She can be your mother, your wife, your girlfriend, your sister, or somebody you work next to. Don't matter. You find one, stay there. You see a scary one, make tracks.

She is not so afraid at night because she is the color of it.

Well, if a man don't HAVE a chance, then he has to TAKE a chance!

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

You are nothing but wilderness. No constraint. No mind. You shout the word—mind, mind, mind—over and over and then you laugh, saying as I live and breathe, a slave by choice.

You can't protect her every minute.