African Americans

"One time we were in the studio and didn't have a drum machine, and he went inside the booth and played the drums on his body. He knew how to EQ it right and everything, like, "Okay, he just made a song using his body." [laughs] It was serious. ~ James Poyser (from the Ruff Draft re-issue liner notes)."

"Dilla was a good cat. He looked out for me, showing me how to work the SP1200, the (MPC) 3000, he used to set me up in his basement, and leave me there all night, while he went out the bar or to mess with some chicks. He was real open-hearted, but he could get on some wild shit. We fell out for a minute, but we mended it and it was all good. He just wanted people to hear the music, but I seen him snap off on cats, he was good people though. He just wanted to make music and do his thing. ~ DJ House Shoes"

"If you were to secretly ask the most praised hip-hop producers, if given a top three, who they fear the most, Dilla’s name would chart on everyone’s list, hands down. ~ ?uestlove, drummer from The Roots"

"Peter Rosenberg: How do you rank Dilla [out of the] all time producers?"

"I knew him for a good three or four years before I knew he was sick! I was blown back by that, man. I never knew he was sick – he always kinda hid it from me. His music will always be alive and well, and I will make sure to that. He was one of the greatest, man. He was the greatest to ever do it, for the new cats. And for his mother to tell me that I was his favorite producer – I was like ‘Wow, that’s dope, man’. He really took it there. He kinda broadened me and opened my eyes again, and got me standing up straight on my toes, ‘cos that dude was really serious with it. ~ Pete Rock"

"Q-Tip comes in the room and says, "I want you to hear something". I'm hella excited 'cause either it's a new Tribe song or it's a beat for me. He tells the kid to put the tape in. He does and I hear a ghostly piano loop that has some shakers in it. Too Salsa for me. That was "Runnin'"! He plays another joint and I go crazy over it. That was "The Jam". He explains to me that the noise I keep flippin' over [is] someone holding the repeat button on the SP when its in 1/32! He played another joint, wasn't my speed. I didn't like the Beastie Boy sample at the top. That was "Drop!" The next joint played and only played for 15 seconds. I wanted that one. He explained that it was just an interlude though. I still wanted it. The next joint was hard, organ sounding joint. Sounds like something a west coast artist would take... w:Ice Cube maybe. That was "Gotta Kick Something That Means Something"! I took three tracks and told Tip that I wanted to add more tracks to the album. He said cool! Yes!!! I got three tracks from Tip!!! Tip looks at me and says, "I didn't make em...he did." I look at the kid and speak to him and he says "What Up Doe?" "What up, kid? What's your name?" "Jay Dee.""

"When I found out Dilla passed, I was in Australia. I did not want to do the show anymore, my mind was heavy. Dilla existed in all of us and I felt a piece of myself was missing. How could I give them my all? But then I thought about Jay on stage in a wheelchair. I HAD to perform. The musicians and the true listeners already knew. I have to spread his legacy to the world, forever. The sounds from The Roots, myself, Mos Def, A Tribe Called Quest, Common, Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, D'Angelo, and of course the slum [Ed. note, Slum Village.] owe to his legacy. Now we are Jay Dee. Rest in peace, Dilla, we love you. ~ Talib Kweli, in one of his blog entries on http://www.talibkweliblog.com"

"All the greats respected him the most. ... Common actually stayed with him in his last days -- they both stayed in L.A. together -- and we would go over there when we were working on the album. And I remember him giving me drums. It was such an honor for him to actually give me drums because I'd actually stolen so many drums off of his beat CDs. (laughs) ... Let's also talk about how many rappers bit his style. He even inspired a lot of rappers. The way he would space his words on the beat. The patterns he would get... All that. Whenever people do that, that's Jay Dee all day long. ~ Kanye West, Rapper and Producer, from an interview with Semtex on BBC Radio, February 18th, 2006"

"People who get a lot of work done are people who give themselves permission. Look at James Baldwin. He has something like 18 major pieces of work to his name. It's because of Jimmy that I became a writer."

"The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another."

"Then James Baldwin stood at the rostrum, his huge eyes burning into the crowd: "The sheriff and his deputies ... these ignorant people... were created by the good white people on the hill-and in Washington-and they've created a monster they can't control.... It's not an act of God. It is deliberately done, deliberately created by the American Republic.""

"The complexity of it all is perhaps revealed in a brief exchange which took place at a SNCC meeting between James Baldwin and Ella Baker. Someone had asked Baldwin about the role of whites in the movement. He replied, "A white man is a white man only if he says he is-but you haven't got to be white." Then Ella Baker added, "The place of the Negro is not as a Negro, but as a human being." And Baldwin said, "That's right.""

"Many articles in the house caught my attention, most notably the many paintings and pieces of sculpture, among them the colorful paintings of the late African-American expatriate painter Beauford Delaney, who had been one of Jimmy's best friends. There were two other pieces that I believed said very much about the political commitment of the man. One, a black pen-and-ink drawing of Nelson Mandela against an orange background, accompanied by a poem, was framed and hung over the dining-room fireplace, the most prominent place in the house."

"In America and in the big beautiful world beyond, the gulf widens perversely, making a mockery of freedom, justice, democracy, and even mercy. James Baldwin said that we are not born knowing what these concepts mean, that they are neither common nor well defined. If we "individuals must make an enormous effort to arrive at the respect for other people that these words imply," as he wrote, then our communities must make a sustained and concentrated effort to create societies that reflect that same sense of respect and meaning."

"I enjoy teaching early Baldwin: I think students appreciate meeting a master at a moment when his style is still something of a hot mess. Also, Baldwin was so brave so young — it’s inspiring, to me as much as to my students."

"The Statue of Liberty is an extension of a tradition that seems to embody the contradictions in America's promise, and a reminder that its promises have not always been extended to us. As the narrator in James Baldwin's 1960 short story "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" puts it, "I would never know what this statue meant to others, she had always been an ugly joke for me.""

"Langston (Hughes) had been the great poet-hero of Harlem for as long as anyone could remember, and Jimmy, who had set the Village alight with The Fire Next Time, was a wonderful, mischievous child-genius at Langston's side, with his great round eyes which for some reason always made him look slightly sad."

"When I used to get blue years ago James Baldwin would say the same thing to me each time, 'This is the world you have made for yourself Nina, now you have to live in it.' Jimmy was always a man to see things as they really are and his gaze would never flinch no matter how unpleasant the things he saw were."

"Baldwin's non-fiction is not only beautiful but genuinely experimental in comparison (for example) with much Joyce- or Nabokov-derived modern work."

"Artists like Nina Simone and James Baldwin, who were able to create work that really spoke about the conditions facing Black people and work that would remain universal contributions to culture—something that would continue to shape generations."

"internal bleeding is no sudden symptom. That uncannily prescient African American writer James Baldwin asked his country, a quarter century ago: "If you don't know my father, how can you know the people in the streets of Tehran?""

"By the time I left my marriage, after seventeen years and three children, I had become identified with the Women's Liberation movement. It was an astonishing time to be a woman of my age. In the 1950s, seeking a way to grasp the pain I seemed to be feeling most of the time, to set it in some larger context, I had read all kinds of things; but it was James Baldwin and Simone de Beauvoir who had described the world-though differently in terms that made the most sense to me. By the end of the sixties there were two political movements-one already meeting severe repression, one just emerging-which addressed those descriptions of the world. And there was, of course, a third movement, or a movement-within-a-movement: the early lesbian manifestoes, the new visibility and activism of lesbians everywhere."

"there was intense racism among Jews as well as white gentiles in the City University, part of the bitter history of Jews and Blacks which James Baldwin had described much earlier, in his 1948 essay "The Harlem Ghetto"; ³ part of the divide-and-conquer script still being rehearsed by those of us who have the least to gain from it."

"The emergence of the Civil Rights movement in the sixties I remember as lifting me out of a sense of personal frustration and hopelessness. Reading James Baldwin's early essays in the fifties had stirred me with a sense that apparently "given" situations like racism could be analyzed and described and that this could lead to action, to change. Racism had been so utter and implicit a fact of my childhood and adolescence, had felt so central among the silences, negations, cruelties, fears, superstitions of my early life, that somewhere among my feelings must have been the hope that if Black people could become free of the immense political and social burdens they were forced to bear, I, too, could become free of all the ghosts and shadows of my childhood, named and unnamed. When "the movement" began, it felt extremely personal to me. And it was often Jews who spoke up for the justice of the cause, Jewish students and civil rights lawyers who travelled South; it was two young Jews who were found murdered with a young Black man in Mississippi: Schwerner, Goodman, Chaney."

"I read only one book by a man in which I thought the sex was wonderfully described, one that I remember, and that is in Jimmy Baldwin's book If Beale Street Could Talk. The scene I'm remembering is a scene where a man takes a shower... There were two people in the sexual scene, and I'm always under the impression whenever I read a man describing sex that there's only one person there-one person's doing the activity, and somebody's receiving it. Only one. But in Jimmy's book, there were two people there, and you felt both of their presences. I don't know why that is that there seems to be only one person in most love-making scenes-maybe they see it that way."

"I am completely indebted to Jimmy Baldwin's prose. It liberated me as a writer. These poems overwhelm without competing with his prose, and I am grateful to have this collection."

"I was also influenced by James Baldwin because, although he wasn't a reporter per se, he wrote wonderful essays raising really important social questions in this accessible, literary, elegant style."

"In the 1940s James Baldwin, Robert Duncan, and Jo Sinclair published pioneering works affirming the homosexual’s humanity."

"SWAT teams, battering rams, and no-knock warrants (immortalized by Gil Scott Heron and written about by James Baldwin), all predate contemporary hyper-militarized police forces."

"A straight-from-the-shoulder writer, writing about the troubled problems of this troubled earth with an illuminating intensity."

"I’ve been inspired by the profound and timeless writings of James Baldwin, Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, and Nina Simone."

"In it [No Name in the Street] he shines, and outshines, as an essayist of high calibre—trenchant, precise, passionate, prickly, always intense."

"He gave up preaching four years later, but at heart, James Baldwin remains a Baptist preacher—note the titles of his books and the main quotations, all Biblical—prophesying hell and fire, relishing the idea of the day when all America will be "levelled": full of guilt at having become a commercial and literary success; anxious not to make his "private peace" with the establishment; and neurotic about not losing touch with the ordinary blacks. He is a tormented man, a state of mind he seems to enjoy. A true Baptist Christian indeed; not a Marxist revolutionary."

"The person who first moved me and still does is the late African-American author James Baldwin. I was 12 when I read his first book, Go Tell It On the Mountain, about his childhood in Harlem in the Thirties. He nailed the emotions I felt right on the head and I read all his subsequent books."

"I want to conclude by quoting from James Baldwin, a courageous writer who refused to let the hope of democracy die in his lifetime and who offered that mix of politics, passion and courage that deserves not just admiration but emulation. His sense of rage was grounded in a working-class sensibility, eloquence and passion that illuminates a higher standard for what it means to be a public intellectual and an engaged intellectual. His words capture something that is missing from the American cultural and political landscape, something affirmative that needs to be seized upon, rethought, and occupied - as part of both the fight against the new authoritarianism and its cynical, dangerous and cruel practices, and the struggle to reclaim a notion of justice and mutuality that seems to be dying in all of us."

"He named for me the things you feel but couldn't utter... articulated for the first time to white America what it meant to be American and a black American at the same time."

"Out of the innumerable appeals that had been made on my behalf, we selected a representative number both from the United States and abroad. To begin the book, we used James Baldwin's moving letter to me. "Some of us, white and black," he wrote, "know how great a price has already been paid to bring into existence a new consciousness, a new people, an unprecedented nation. If we know, and do nothing, we are worse than the murderers hired in our name. If we know, then we must fight for your life as though it were our own-which it is-and render impassable with our bodies the corridor to the gas chamber. For, if they take you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night." It struck us that the title of the anthology should be If They Come in the Morning."

"The one thing that did excite me during that freshman year was the news that James Baldwin was scheduled to deliver a series of lectures on literature. Since I had first discovered Go Tell It on the Mountain, I read all of Baldwin's writings I could find. When he came to Brandeis, I made sure I captured a front seat. But he had hardly gotten into his lecturing when the news broke that the world was teetering on the edge of the abyss of World War III. The Cuban Missile Crisis had erupted. James Baldwin announced that he could not continue his lectures without contradicting his moral conscience and abdicating his political responsibilities."

"I loved James Baldwin when I was young. Go Tell It on the Mountain is a book I've read several times, with passion. Above all, for me as a West Indian woman, the book had a novel theme in its relationship with God, its reinterpretation of God, and its way of addressing him in a very different language. The book also had something quite universal: a child who was ill-loved and unappreciated by his stepfather. These issues were also present in my consciousness, so I adored Baldwin."

"James Baldwin's 1955 Giovanni's Room and 1962 Another Country dealt with the complicated intersections of sexuality and race through homosexual characters. As early as 1949, in his essay "The Preservation of Innocence," Baldwin directly connected heterosexual hostility toward homosexuals to white hostility toward African Americans. He saw both as a failure of the imagination to connect fully with one's own humanity. He explores this idea in his 1963 The Fire Next Time: "White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this-which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never-the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.""

"James Baldwin was born for truth. It called upon him to tell it on the mountains, to preach it in Harlem, to sing it on the Left Bank in Paris. His honesty and courage would lead him to see truth and to write truth in poetry, drama, fiction, and essay. He was a giant."

"...the world is present, and the world is not white, and America is not the symbol of civilization. Neither is England. Neither is France. Something else is happening that will engulf them by and by. You, Quincy, will be here, but I'll be gone. It's the only hope the world has-that Western hegemony and civilization be contained. (1988)"

"I am not a black nationalist but some of my best friends are...Why aren't I a black nationalist? Because I don't believe it is enough to be black-one has to be human as well. We did not struggle for four hundred years just to become like the white man". (1985)"

"Change does come, but not when or in the ways we want it to come. George Jackson, Malcolm X-now people all over the world were changed by them. Because they told the secret; now, the secret was out. (“And the secret?”) Put it this way. In 1968, along with Lord Caradon (British Delegate to the United Nations then), I addressed an assembly of the World Council of Churches in Switzerland on "white racism or world community?" When Lord Caradon was asked why the West couldn't break relations with South Africa, he brought out charts and figures that showed that the West would be bankrupt if they did that: the prosperity of the West is standing on the back of the South African miner. When he stands up, the whole thing will be over. (1985)"

"(“How do you assess the results of the war in Vietnam on the American people?”) Americans are terrified. For the first time they know that they are capable of genocide. History is built on genocide. But they can't face it. And it doesn't make any difference what Americans think that they think-they are terrified. (1985)"

"(You seem very troubled but not by death?) JB: Yes, true, but not at all by death. I'm troubled over getting my work done and over all the things I've not learned. It's useless to be troubled by death, because then, of course, you can't live at all. (1984)"

"Perhaps the turning point in one's life is realizing that to be treated like a victim is not necessarily to become one. (1984)"

"I read everything. I read my way out of the two libraries in Harlem by the time I was thirteen. One does learn a great deal about writing this way. First of all, you learn how little you know. It is true that the more one learns the less one knows. I'm still learning how to write. I don't know what technique is. All I know is that you have to make the reader see it. This I learned from Dostoyevsky, from Balzac. (1984)"

"I say a new language. I might say a new morality, which, in my terms, comes to the same thing. And that's on all levels the level of color, the level of identity, the level of sexual identity, what love means, especially in a consumer society, for example. Everything is in question, according to me. One has to forge a new language to deal with it. (1984)"

"There're two things we have to do love each other and raise our children. We have to do that! The alternative, for me, would be suicide. (1984)"