The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman Quotes

“I have yet to see an intelligent or middle class American Negro laugh and sing and dance spontaneously.”
― Amritjit Singh, The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader

“They, themselves, adore Negro women, but tolerate Negro men only for appearances' sake.”
― Amritjit Singh, The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader

“He had discovered too that the majority of those Negroes who spent the greater part of their time professing a love of race in one breath, and denouncing whites in another, was, for the most part, insincere and ignorant demagogues, no matter how many Phi Beta Kappa keys they strung across their vests, or how many academic degrees they initialed behind their names. They”
― Amritjit Singh, The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader

“You are a civilized man; the racist is not; do not fight with him to grant you your humanity, but laugh at the loss of his; do not admit inferiority in any sense, but claim, directly or indirectly, that you are superior”
― Amritjit Singh, The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader

“A man's complexion has little to do with his talent. He either has it or has it not, and despite the dictates of spiritually starved white sophisticates genius does not automatically descend upon one because one's grandmother happened to be sold down the river "befo' de wah.”
― Amritjit Singh, The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader

“But who are doctors that I should heed them?”
― Amritjit Singh, The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader

“It is almost incomprehensible to them that the American Negro should share the American white man's prejudice against foreigners, and that he should vigorously resent their intrusion into his community.
Another aspect of Harlem little”
― Amritjit Singh, The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader

“Educated dark-skinned males often married light-skinned women and had successful professional careers.”
― Amritjit Singh, The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader

“Thurman believed, however, that racial bigotry would continue in its various manifestations as long as color functioned as a social marker, with the devices for the border patrolling of racialized identities powerfully in place.”
― Amritjit Singh, The Collected Writings of Wallace Thurman: A Harlem Renaissance Reader