Preface

[Learning to read] was a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, with which my youthful understanding had struggled, but struggled in vain. I now understood what had been to me a most perplexing difficulty—to wit, the white man’s power to enslave the black man. It was a grand achievement, and I prized it highly. From that moment, I understood the pathway from slavery to freedom.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass [1845]

We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.

The Meaning of the Fourth of July to the Negro. Speech, Rochester, New York [July 5, 1852]

In 1855 Frederick Douglass published his second enduring autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom. That same year John Bartlett, a bookstore owner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, published a 258-page volume titled A Collection of Familiar Quotations. Douglass, who had long been known as a stirring orator in the cause of abolition and for his nationally best-selling Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (which also received international attention), did not make it into Bartlett’s collection; nor did any women, save Mrs. Barbauld. But, then again, neither did George Washington or Thomas Jefferson. In fact, Benjamin Franklin was the most prominent founding father to gain inclusion, alongside such notables as Shakespeare and Lord Byron. Both Douglass and Bartlett published their books just before the Civil War, amid a bitter battle over the enslavement of people of African descent that would continue to challenge notions of who was and what it meant to be American, making Douglass’s absence from Bartlett’s anthology even more glaring.

Up until the fourteenth edition, in 1968, only a few black voices could be found in what came to be known as Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations. Editor Emily Morrison Beck boldly revamped the book, adding many more black and female speakers, and deepened the international scope. She added Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Barbara Jordan, and writers such as Nikki Giovanni, Derek Walcott, and Ralph Ellison. Morrison Beck was criticized for expanding the international definition in Bartlett’s beyond Europe and redefining ancient and contemporary speakers, but by doing so she set the tone for broader inclusion in future editions.

John Bartlett wrote that the purpose of his book was “to show, to some extent, the obligations our language owes to various authors for numerous phrases and familiar quotations which have become household words.” This first edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations does the same specifically for black cultures while also restoring words lost, omitted, or forgotten during slavery and the struggles for freedom and equality.

Sources range from African proverbs to the rhyming verse of Muhammad Ali; from the separatist philosophy of Marcus Garvey to the humanistic, visionary grace of Nelson Mandela; from the musings of Benjamin Banneker to the Nobel Prize–winning words of Toni Morrison. Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations also records the “folks” from various eras, through popular sayings and anonymous speakers. It was, after all, a church elder known as Mother Pollard who said during the Montgomery bus boycott, “My feets is tired, but my soul is rested.” Quotations have been selected for popularity and familiarity, originality, historical significance, and sometimes simply for eloquence and beauty.

Quotations have been culled from novels, poems, speeches, essays, memoirs, slave narratives, films, television shows and appearances, radio interviews, song lyrics, letters, biographies, and black and mainstream periodicals. Speakers in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations include writers, artists, musicians, poets, philosophers, politicians, athletes, activists, playwrights, singers, actors, religious leaders, and others whose words were significant in their time and have endured beyond it. Many of these speakers have never been represented in such a collection before.

Building Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations has been a process of reaching back and reaching forward. Various schools of thought are represented: Huey P. Newton’s black power stance is given a place at the table, along with the nationalist philosophy of Malcolm X and the civil disobedience of Bayard Rustin. The result is a range of speakers and well-known quotes: “I have a dream” (Martin Luther King, Jr.); “What happens to a dream deferred?” (Langston Hughes); “Look up, you mighty race!” (Marcus Garvey). And lesser-known but equally powerful quotations are included, such as “When and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole Negro race enters with me” (Ana Julia Cooper).

In Notes of a Native Son, James Baldwin writes, “They face each other, the Negro and the African, over a gulf of three hundred years—an alienation too vast to be conquered in an evening’s good-will, too heavy and too double-edged ever to be trapped in speech.… [The Negro] cannot deny them, nor can they ever be divorced.” Although a majority of the quotations in this collection come from African Americans, Africa and the African diaspora are also represented.

Challenges linked to racism and oppression have been continuous in black lives, and so the recurrence of themes leads sometimes to a similarity of sentiment and conversations within and across eras. Opposition to slavery and oppression is as old as the “peculiar institution” itself, as evidenced by King Afonso’s sixteenth-century letter to the king of Portugal: “We cannot reckon how great the damage is, since the… merchants daily seize our subjects, sons of the land and sons of our noblemen, and vassals and our relatives.… They grab them and cause them to be sold; and so great, Sir, is their corruption and licentiousness that our country is being utterly depopulated.” And as the enslaved African playwright and poet Terence writes, “In fact, nothing is said that has not been said before.”

Although black speakers have had much to say about the struggle against oppression, Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations does not limit itself to protest alone. Once again in the words of Terence, “While there’s life, there’s hope.” Nikki Giovanni writes about love as often as she does about race, and comedians such as Bert Williams, Richard Pryor, and Chris Rock have blended highly quotable humor with social insight.

In his introduction to the Fourth Edition of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, John Bartlett writes, “It has been thought better to incur the risk of erring on the side of fullness.” In that tradition, the reader of Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations will find quotes that are urgent (“If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated”—Carter G. Woodson); exuberant (“Imagination! who can sing thy force? / Or who describe the swiftness of thy course?”—Phillis Wheatley); saucily defiant (“Sometimes, I feel discriminated against, but it does not make me angry. It merely astonishes me. How can any deny themselves the pleasure of my company?”—Zora Neale Hurston); and lyrical (“This is the urgency: Live! / and have your blooming in the noise of the whirlwind”—Gwendolyn Brooks). As a whole, the quotations included capture humor, strivings, insights, history, and moments of controversy as observed by black people.

As in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, the Bible is a major source in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations. In defiance of the use of “the good book” by some to justify slavery, enslaved black people embraced the Bible as an important tool of activism and an inspiration for black oratory. Other holy texts are quoted as well, including the Koran and the Kebra Nagast.

Literary sources in Bartlett’s Familiar Black Quotations range from Phillis Wheatley to Jupiter Hammon, Chinua Achebe to Wole Soyinka, Alice Walker to Jamaica Kincaid. Early writers such as Harriet E. Wilson and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper captured the harsh realities and emotional toll of slavery. More than half a century later, Countee Cullen asked, “What is Africa to me?” Still later, Amiri Baraka and Sonia Sanchez used words as protest. Writers such as Rita Dove, Aimé Césaire, and August Wilson documented the intimate moments of their times. “I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me,” writes Ralph Ellison in Invisible Man. The art of the written word makes black lives visible despite such refusals.

The impact of music on black culture and of black music on world culture is undeniable; thus a wealth of words from songwriters and performers is quoted here. Black American musicians and songwriters in all genres have had a particularly strong impact on the national lexicon. The reader will find James Brown exclaiming, “Say it loud, I’m black and I’m proud!” The volume includes lyrics by songwriters such as Holland-Dozier-Holland and Otis Blackwell and by writer/performers such as Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, Chuck Berry, Chuck D, Prince, and Muddy Waters.

Notable political figures include Nelson Mandela of South Africa and Ellen Johnson Sirleaf of Liberia. During the course of this book’s development, President Barack Obama transformed from being the keynote speaker at the 2004 Democratic National Convention to becoming a senator to being the first black person elected to the highest office of the United States. Frederick Douglass wrote in 1857, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Douglass agitated on behalf of oppressed African Americans and continues to challenge generations of Americans, and his legacy echoes in the eloquent words of President Obama: “Nothing can stand in the way of the power of millions of voices calling for change.”

Many of the quotes illuminate and debate what blackness is and what it means to be human. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., writes, “I want to be black, to know black, to luxuriate in whatever I might be calling blackness at any particular time—but to do so in order to come out the other side, to experience a humanity that is neither colorless nor reducible to color. Bach and James Brown. Sushi and fried catfish.” This collection underscores the complexity of the black experience the world over.

Many thanks to researchers Ashley Williams and Marc Powers and to the following for kindly serving as advisors offering comments and suggestions: Valerie Boyd, Catherine Clinton, Veronica Chambers, Lisa Dent, Steven G. Fullwood, Michael A. Gomez, E. Ethelbert Miller, Ishmael Reed, Franklin Sirmans, and Ben Zimmer. I am eternally grateful to Henry Louis Gates, Jr., for generously writing the foreword.

I am indebted to Neeti Madan for sharing her wisdom, to Tracy Behar for her patience and guidance with this project, and to Michael Pietsch and Mary Tondorf-Dick for the opportunity to work on this volume. Many thanks to Little, Brown and Company’s Christina Rodriguez, Jenny Tai, and Peggy Freudenthal and to copyeditors Liz Duvall, Laura Lawrie, Katherine Kiger, Cynthia Lindlof, Michael Neibergall, and Kathryn Rogers.

Thanks also to James Powers, Christopher Nickelson, Martin Jamison, Kakuna Kerina, Carolyn Ferrell, Robyn Crawford, John Howard, David Unger, Robert L. Harris, Jr., Walter Fluker, Ruth Shoge, Carla Whyte, Efua Morgan, and Deborah Baker.

This book would not have been possible without the generosity of David Silverman, who lent his technical skills and eagle eye to troubleshooting style and formatting issues. Nor could I have completed this undertaking in the absence of the encouragement, support, handholding, and cheerleading of Jen Silverman. Isa, you were but a hope when this work began, but you’ve been my North Star, and this book is for you. Finally, I am grateful to the librarians and pages of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, who cheerfully pulled many hundreds, if not thousands, of books from its estimable stacks. As Toni Morrison observes, “Access to knowledge is the superb, the supreme act of truly great civilizations.” The Schomburg makes this quite evident.

Retha Powers

New York, 2013