I Am A Negro: Black As The

We Younger Negro Artists Who Create Now Intend To Express Our Individual Dark-skinned Selves Without Fear Or Shame. If White People Are Pleased, We Are Glad. If They Are Not, It Doesn't Matter. We Know We Are Beautiful. And Ugly Too. The Tom-tom Cries And The Tom-tom Laughs. If Colored People Are Pleased, We Are Glad. If They Are Not, It Doesn't Matter Either. We Build Our Temples For Tomorrow, Strong As We Know How, And We Stand On Top Of The Mountain, Free Within Ourselves.

Politics In Any Country In The World Is Dangerous. For The Poet, Politics In Any Country Had Better Be Disguised As Poetry. Politics Can Be The Graveyard Of The Poet. And Only Poetry Can Be His Resurrection.

Life Is An Egg You Have To Be Patient And Careful With It Or It Will Break.

Negro Writers, Just By Being Black, Have Been On The Blacklist All Our Lives. Do You Know That There Are Libraries In Our Country That Will Not Stock A Book By A Negro Writer, Not Even As A Gift? There Are Towns Where Negro Newspapers And Magazines Cannot Be Sold Except Surreptitiously. There Are American Magazines That Have Never Published Anything By Negroes. There Are Film Studios That Have Never Hired A Negro Writer. Censorship For Us Begins At The Color Line.

Negroes - Sweet And Docile, Meek, Humble, And Kind: Beware The Day - They Change Their Mind.