“If the American Negro is to have a culture of his own he will have to leave America to get it.”

— Paul Robeson

As quoted in "Paul Robeson and Negro Music" in The New York Times (5 April 1931)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "If the American Negro is to have a culture of his own he will have to leave America to get it." by Paul Robeson?

Paul Robeson photo

Paul Robeson22

American singer and actor 1898–1976

Related quotes

“Education means an assimilation of white American culture. It decreases the dissimilarity of the Negroes from other Americans.”

Gunnar Myrdal book An American Dilemma

Source: An American Dilemma (1944), p. 879

“The Iraqis have a country that inherited cultures thousands of years old while the Americans have a culture only two hundred years old. Two hundred years will teach thousands of years!? Oh Americans, leave Iraq for its people.”

Yusuf Qaradawi (1926) Egyptian imam

Sheikh Al-Qaradhawi Reacts to the Murder of Four Americans in Al-Fallujah: 'How could you punish an entire people because four corpses were mutilated?' http://www.memritv.org/clip_transcript/en/31.htm April 2004.

“Negroes, as they enter our culture, are going to inherit the problems we have, but with a difference. They are outsiders and they are going to know that they have these problems. They are going to be self‑conscious; they are going to be gifted with a double vision, for, being Negroes, they are going to be both inside and outside of our culture at the same time. Every emotional and cultural convulsion that ever shook the heart and soul of Western man will shake them. Negroes will develop unique and specially defined psychological types. They will become psychological men, like the Jews... They will not only be Americans or Negroes; they will be centers of knowing, so to speak... The political, social, and psychological consequences of this will be enormous...”

Richard Wright book The Outsider

The Outsider (1953)

“I think that New York is not the cultural center of America, but the business and administrative center of American culture.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

BBC radio interview, The Listener (London, 1969-05-22)
General sources

“France and the whole of Europe have a great culture and an amazing history. Most important thing, though, is that people there know how to live! In America they've forgotten all about it. I'm afraid that the American culture is a disaster.”

Johnny Depp (1963) American actor, film producer, and musician

“The essence of the irony of the plight of the Negro in America, to me, is that he is doomed to live in isolation while those who condemn him seek the basest goals of any people on the face of the earth. Perhaps it would be possible for the Negro to become reconciled to his plight if he could be made to believe that his sufferings were for some remote, high, sacrificial end; but sharing the culture that condemns him, and seeing that a lust for trash is what blinds the nation to his claims, is what sets storms to rolling in his soul.”

Richard Wright book Black Boy

Black Boy (1945)

“America is no longer afraid of the word culture. In fact, it is considering quite seriously in some quarters having a culture of its own and calling it by that name. This makes it possible to consider as Americanization a recognition of the cultural forces in the various races as expressed in their literature and institutions. There is a growing appreciation of the fraternal and religious forces in the lives of the various races and their indispensable value in race fusion. In the old world, the cultural life of a race is so inextricably associated with their religious life that its first vital contact with American cultural life would seem to proceed along the lines of religious and fraternal development.”

Frances Kellor (1873–1952) American sociologist

What is Americanization? (1919)

“When the war started in Abyssinia all Negro nationalists looked with hope to Haile Selassie. They spoke for him, they prayed for him, they sung for him, they did everything to hold up his hands, as Aaron did for Moses; but whilst the Negro peoples of the world were praying for the success of Abyssinia this little Emperor was undermining the fabric of his own kingdom by playing the fool with white men, having them advising him[, ] having them telling him what to do, how to surrender, how to call off the successful thrusts of his [Race] against the Italian invaders. Yes, they were telling him how to prepare his flight, and like an imbecilic child he followed every advice and then ultimately ran away from his country to England, leaving his people to be massacred by the Italians, and leaving the serious white world to laugh at every Negro and repeat the charge and snare - "he is incompetent," "we told you so." Indeed Haile Selassie has proved the incompetence of the Negro for political authority, but thank God there are Negroes who realise that Haile Selassie did not represent the truest qualities of the Negro race. How could he, when he wanted to play white? How could he, when he surrounded himself with white influence? How could he, when in a modern world, and in a progressive civilization, he preferred a slave State of black men than a free democratic country where the black citizens could rise to the same opportunities as white citizens in their democracies?”

Marcus Garvey (1887–1940) Jamaica-born British political activist, Pan-Africanist, orator, and entrepreneur

The Failure of Haile Selassie as Emperor in The Blackman, April, 1937.

“What we really want to do is to be left alone. We don't want Negroes around. We don't need Negroes around. We're not asking— you know, we don't want to have them, you know, for our culture. We simply want our own country and our own society. That's in no way exploitive at all. We want our own society, our own nation….”

David Duke (1950) American White nationalist, white supremacist, writer, right-wing politician, and a former Republican Louisiana …

Interview with Evelyn Rich (March 1985)

“But greatly his most important culture he had gathered — and this, too, by his own endeavors — from the better part of the district, the religious men; to whom, as to the most excellent, his own nature gradually attached and attracted him. He was religious with the consent of his whole faculties. Without religion he would have been nothing.”

Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) Scottish philosopher, satirical writer, essayist, historian and teacher

1880s, Reminiscences (1881)

Related topics