To the lack of incentive to effort, which is the awful shadow under which we live, may be traced the wreck and ruin of scores of colored youth.
I cannot help wondering sometimes what I might have become and might have done if I had lived in a country which had not circumscribed and handicapped me on account of my race, that had allowed me to reach any height I was able to attain.
Seeing their children touched and seared and wounded by race prejudice is one of the heaviest crosses which colored women have to bear.
And so, lifting as we climb, onward and upward we go, struggling and striving, and hoping that the buds and blossoms of our desires will burst into glorious fruition ere long.
Nobody wants to know a colored woman’s opinion about her own status of that of her group. When she dares express it, no matter how mild or tactful it may be, it is called ‘propaganda,’ or is labeled ‘controversial.’ Those two words have come to have a very ominous sound to me.
While most girls run away from home to marry, I ran away to teach.
As a colored woman I might enter Washington any night, stranger in a strange land, and walk miles without finding a place to lay my head.
As the brains of colored women expanded, their hearts began to grow. No sooner had the heads of a favored few been filled with knowledge than their hearts yearned to dispense blessings to the less fortunate of their race.