Maya Angelou Black Quotations

Won't it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

I speak to the black experience, but I am always talking about the human condition.

I agree with Balzac and 19th-century writers, black and white, who say, 'I write for money.' Yes, I think everybody should be paid handsomely; I insist on it, and I pay people who work for me, or with me, handsomely.

The first decade of the twentieth century was not a great time to be born black and poor and female in St. Louis, Missouri, but Vivian Baxter was born black and poor, to black and poor parents. Later she would grow up and be called beautiful. As a grown woman she would be known as the butter-colored lady with the blowback hair.

The hope, the hope that lives in the breast of the black American, is just so tremendous that it overwhelms me sometimes.

When I try to describe myself to God I say, “Lord, remember me? Black? Female? Six-foot tall? The writer?” And I almost always get God's attention.

Shakespeare must be a black girl.

Black women have not historically stood in the pulpit, but that doesn't undermine the fact that they built the churches and maintain the pulpits.

I write because I am a Black woman, listening attentively to her people.

Always in the black spirituals there's that promise that things are going to be better, by and by.

In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what whites looked like.

There is a kind of strength that is almost frightening in Black women. It's as if a steel rod runs right through the head down to the feet.

A woman needs someone she can trust, someone who laughs when she laughs, but who has different ideas so she can learn from and teach to them. She needs someone who will stand up with her and encourage her to be a woman-not just a female. See where you are, admit what you know, and what you need, and search for a sister friend.

I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.

It is imperative that young white men and women study the black American history. It is imperative that blacks and whites study the Asian American history.