Quotes from book
Blues People

Name: Blues People
Author: Amiri Baraka

Amiri Baraka

Examines the history of the Negro in America through the music he created

“The poor Negro always remembered himself as an ex-slave and used this as the basis of any dealings with the mainstream of American society. The middle class black man bases his whole existence on the hopeless hypothesis that no one is supposed to remember that for almost three hundred years there was slavery in America, that the white man was a master, the black man a slave. This knowledge, however, is at the root of the legitimate black culture of this country. It is this knowledge, with its attendant muses of self-division, self-hatred, stoicism, and finally quixotic optimism, that informs the most meaningful of Afro-American music.”

Amiri Baraka book Blues People

Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), p. 136

“One of the most persistent traits of of the Western white man has always been his fanatical and almost instinctive assumption that his systems and ideas about the world are the most desirable, and further that people who do not aspire to to them, or at least think them admirable, are savages or enemies.”

Amiri Baraka book Blues People

The idea that Western thought might be exotic if viewed from another landscape never presents itself to most Westerners.
Blues People: Negro Music in White America (1963), p. 8

Similar authors

Amiri Baraka 6

African-American writer 1934–2014

Nadine Gordimer 57

South african Nobel-winning writer

Rosa Parks 22

African-American civil rights activist

Muhammad Ali 100

African American boxer, philanthropist and activist

Wole Soyinka 11

Nigerian writer

Desmond Tutu 85

South African churchman, politician, archbishop, Nobel Priz…

Frank Herbert 158

American writer

Malcolm X 180

American human rights activist

William Saroyan 190

American writer

Ray Bradbury 401

American writer