Popularity: -7
Vote:   | A lot of people today look at Booker T. Washington as a Uncle Tom as a sell out to his community. That business tradition that you see celebrated today and BET and any number of successful black enterprises, it starts off with Booker T. Washington. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Before Booker T. Washington, we have small business owners but we do not have a philosopher of black entrepreneurship, and that's what Washington was. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Duke Ellington doesn't name himself. He's nicknamed by his friends because of the manner in which he dresses, the manner in which he presents himself. He embodies all of that aristocratic tradition that made Duke Ellington noticed as a member of some kind of aristocratic class. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | Duke Ellington went to New York in the early '20s. He was a product of Washington, D.C. He was much nurtured and much noticed as a prodigy. He played in many of the wealthy mansions that are in the Dupont circle area, that today are now embassies or museums or private clubs. And this was the Washington that made Duke Ellington, Duke Ellington. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | Ellington never graduated from high school, so when you speak about his success as a musician, his success as a businessman, his success as an organizer, the city was his tutor. |
Popularity: -2
Vote: | Even during my youth, I can recall very few black people living on any kind of public assistance. People were working, doing some kind of job that was useful to the community. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Frederick Douglass was born on the eastern shore of Maryland. He made Washington, D.C., his home for many, many years. That home that he has over in Anacostia is as close to Monticello as any black American has ever come. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | Howard is still a great school. But many of the great faculty members that would be at Howard today are now at Harvard and Yale and Princeton. All this comes as a consequence of affirmative action and the admissions policies that encouraged blacks to enroll in the Ivy League schools. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | I never heard people speak about segregation as some great cross that they were bearing. They just went on about their lives. Some of them had good contacts with white people that they were serving in someone's home. Sometimes those white families almost effectively adopted you. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | I think in terms of the specific aspects making Washington different than, say, Atlanta, or even Richmond or many other southern cities is the immediate post-civil war period. The fact that you create Howard University in 1867 just two years after the war ends. No other city that has a black community can claim a Howard. |
Popularity: 1
Vote: | Many of the master chefs in the South, both the upper South as well as the deep South, were blacks and many of those people came here to Washington, D.C., and opened up establishments. Very, very few of them have survived. But they certainly were very prominent. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | One of the aspects of the Post-Civil War period is that it unleashed in the black community this latent talent that had always been there but had not been manifested in so many different areas of activity. |
Popularity: 4
Vote: | One of the prices that we pay for integration was the disintegration of the black community. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | People should have the choice to be able to live where they want to live, go to school where they want to go to school, marry whoever they want to marry regardless of what their complexion is and so forth. |
Popularity: -4
Vote: | Segregation was a burden for many blacks, because the end of the civil war and the amendments added to the constitution elevated expectations beyond reality in some respects. |
Popularity: -3
Vote: | So I'm a young boy in the 1940s growing up, seeing Ralph Bunche on a regular basis, seeing Duke Ellington on a regular basis. We know that these people are famous. They're living in the same community as we live in. They go to the same stores and shops. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The black community now in many ways divided itself the way the larger white community divides itself, over class issues. And that race is no longer the bond that it once was. That's one of the prices you pay for progress. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | The community put such a premium on success. And you had no excuse to blame racism or discrimination as a reason why you couldn't succeed. |
Popularity: 2
Vote: | The Washington black community was able to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. I mean, we had our own newspapers, our own restaurants, our own theaters, our own small shops, our own clubs, our own Masonic lodges. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | There were some kind white people out there who provided a loan here or there, or a little bit of land. But Booker T. Washington and his followers knew that they were going to have to draw from their own resources and they knew that the larger white world was looking at them, every day, closely monitoring them. |
Popularity: 0
Vote: | There's a way in which you can look at clothing as your outer skin. And because you were discriminated against because of your complexion, the way in which you could overcome that was through the way in which you presented yourself with your clothing. |
Popularity: -6
Vote: | We didn't have any Ku Klux Klan in Washington, D.C. There was no White Citizens Council. I mean, there was just this vast separation that you didn't have any kind of contact with until you went beyond the boundaries of your community. |
Popularity: 3
Vote: | We were visited by whites, who always found coming into the black community to be interesting. Some even found it exotic. They knew that some of our restaurants were superior to their own. One of the interesting things is that whites discriminated against blacks. Blacks never discriminated against whites, and so they were always welcome. |
Popularity: -1
Vote: | When you say that you are a race man, it means that you embrace the entire black community regardless of the hue, whether somebody is very light and could pass for possibly white or someone is very dark. |
Popularity: 5
Vote: | When you were growing up in the 30s, 20s, of course the 40s, all black people at least in the Washington, D.C., area were required to live among themselves. |