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"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."
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"It is not true that people are naturally equal for no two people can be together for even a half an hour without one acquiring an evident superiority over the other."

"He makes people pleased with him by making them first pleased with themselves."

"People are always good company when they are doing what they really enjoy."

"Prune - prune businesses, products, activities, people. Do it annually."

"Some people bear three kinds of trouble - the ones they've had, the ones they have, and the ones they expect to have."
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"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"One of the prices that we pay for integration was the disintegration of the black community."

"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."
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