O black and unknown bards of long ago How came your lips to touch the sacred fire? How in your darkness did you come to know The power and beauty of the minstrel's lyre?
Not for myself I make this prayer But for this race of mine That stretches forth from shadowed places Dark hands for bread and wine.
-
Countee Cullen
The image of God cut in ebony.
-
Thomas Fuller
O black and unknown bards of long ago How came your lips to touch the sacred fire? How in your darkness did you come to know The power and beauty of the minstrel's lyre?
-
James Weldon Johnson
In the Negro countenance you will often meet with strong traits of benignity. I have felt yearnings of tenderness towards some of these faces.
-
Charles Lamb
The best way to uncolor the Negro is to give the white man a white heart.
-
Panin
More Quotes By James Weldon Johnson
In the life of everyone there is a limited number of experiences which are not written upon the memory, but stamped there with a die; and in the long years after, they can be called up in detail, and every emotion that was stirred by...
There were two immediate results of my forced loneliness: I began to find company in books, and greater pleasure in music.
It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.
American musicians, instead of investigating ragtime, attempt to ignore it, or dismiss it with a contemptuous word. But that has always been the course of scholasticism in every branch of art. Whatever new thing the 'people' like is poohpoohed; whatever is 'popular' is spoken of...
