Having Our Say Quotes

We've buried so many people we've loved; that is the hard part of living this long. Most everyone we know has turned to dust. (1.1.6)

Sometimes I am angry at all white people, until I stop and think of the nice white people I have known in my life [...] And my own mother is part white, and I can't hate my own flesh and blood! (1....

My father would usually call my mother [...] Mrs. Delany in front of everyone [...] But the reason they did this is that colored people were always called by their first names in that era. It was a...

Those were hard times, after slavery days. Much of the South was scarred by the Civil War and there wasn't much food or supplies among the whites, let alone the Negroes. (2.5.12)

The whites fixed it so those Negroes could never get ahead. Wasn't much better than slavery. The whites were able to cheat the Negroes because very few Negroes could read or write or do arithmetic....

That was a time when a colored woman wasn't safe in the least. Men could do anything to a colored woman and they wouldn't get in trouble with the law, not one bit. (2.6.12)

They could read and write, and they hadn't been abused, and their family was still together. That's a lot more than most former slaves had going for them. (2.5.15)

The reason they passed those Jim Crow laws is that powerful white people were getting more and more nervous with the way colored people [...] were starting to accumulate some wealth, to vote, to ma...