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.

The one thing that the racist can never manage is anything like discrimination: he is indiscriminate by definition.

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.

The outcast lepers would like to drag everything down in their ruin. And they become all the more evil, the more you cast them out; and the more you depict them as a court of lemurs who want your ruin, the more they will be outcast.

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.

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.