Africans must change their mind and actions. The keys to building your continent depends on your will-power, persistent effort and action towards self liberation.

— Lailah Gifty Akita

Honey, DE white man is the ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tub find out. Maybe it's some place way off in the ocean where DE black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see.

— Zora Neale Hurston

I do not know if all cops are poets, but I know that all cops carry guns with triggers.

— Ralph Ellison

Like many families, everyone wandered around like children in a fun house—they could hardly see one another around the corners, and what they could see was completely distorted.

— James Hannaham

.she began to stand around the gate and expect things. What things? She didn't know exactly. Her breath was gusty and short. She knew things that nobody ever told her. For instance, the words of the trees and the wind. . She knew the world was a stallion rolling in the blue pasture of ether. She knew that God tore down the old world every evening and built a new one by sun-up. It was wonderful to see it take form with the sun and emerge from the gray dust of its making.

— Zora Neale Hurston

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to the tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight.

— Zora Neale Hurston

So she sat on the porch and watched the moon rise. Soon its amber fluid was drenching the earth, and quenching the thirst of the day.

— Zora Neale Hurston

You have a color of your own-Dark chocolate, You have a culture your own-Hip pop, You have a revival of your own-Harlem Renaissance, You are the spot on a ladybug that adds its beauty, You are the pupil of an eye, You are the vastness of space, You are the richness of soil, You are the sweetness of dark chocolate, You are the mystery in nature, Blessed Black chocolate, God has made You to rule the Land, that made You a slave.

— Luffina Lourduraj