To Be Young, Gifted, and Black: An Informal Autobiography

Of love and my parents, there is little to be written; their relationship to their children was utilitarian. We were fed and housed and dressed and outfitted with more cash than our associates and that was all. We were also vaguely taught certain vague absolutes: that we were better than no one but infinitely superior to everyone...

Write if you will: but write about the world as it is and as you think it ought to be and must be—if there is to be a world. Write about all the things that men have written about since the beginning of writing and talking—but write to a point. Work hard at it, care about it. Write about our people: tell their story. You have something glorious to draw on begging for attention. Don’t pass it up. Use it. Good luck to you. The Nation needs your gifts. Lorraine Hansberry speech, “To Be Young, Gifted, and Black,” given to Readers Digest/United Negro College Fund creative writing contest winners, NYC, May 1, 1964.

...I am the first to say that ours is a complex and difficult country and some of our complexities are indeed grotesque. We who are Negro Americans can offer that last remark with unwavering insistence. It is, on the other hand, also a great nation with certain beautiful and indestructible traditions and potentials which can be seized by all of who possess imagination and love of man. There is, as a certain play suggests, a great deal to be fought in America - but, at the same time, there is so much which begs to be but re-affirmed and cherished with sweet defiance.

It isn't as if we got up today and said, "What can we do to irritate America?" It's because, since 1619, Negroes have tried every method of communication, of transformation of their situation, from petition to the vote— everything—we've tried it all; there isn't anything that hasn't been exhausted.

The things he taught me were great things: that all racism was rotten, white or black, that everything is political; that people tend to be indescribably beautiful and uproariously funny. He also taught me that they have enemies who are grotesque and that freedom lies in the recognition of all of that and other things.

In the twentieth century men everywhere like to breathe; and the Negro citizen still cannot, you see, breathe.

The poets have been right in all these centuries, darling; even in its astounding imperfection this earth of ours is magnificent. But oh this human race!

I suppose that the most heroic expression that I have ever seen was on the face of a certain tough-looking, brutalized, slum-slaughtered woman at Coney Island. She had her arm around a girl child who looked hardly less brutalized and slum-slaughtered - "We is going to have a good time tonight!" the look said.

Baby, you could be Jesus in drag but if you're brown they're sure you're selling.

I think it’s very simple that the whole idea of debating whether or not Negroes should defend themselves is an insult.