LaDainian Tomlinson, Hines Ward, Marion Barber, and a host of other black stars help the NFL shine brightly week after week.
For me... you know, the most I've paid for a haircut was in Australia. Usually I go to a black barber or a Latino barber. I can't just go into Supercuts.
It's not enough even to have one black Barbie... because black women are not a monolith.
Now I'm way into suits that I can put on whether I took a shower or not, and wear barefoot and paint my toes black or whatever color the suit is. It's very cool to wear suits like that. Roll up the sleeves and just say yee-haw.
I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.
We haven't got those dreams: 'I wish to become doctor or a lawyer.' Black people in South Africa have been barred in doing anything that would articulate their cause.
I've always been multi-cultural myself. I'm not black and I'm not white and I'm not pink and I'm not green. Eartha Kitt has no color, and that is how barriers are broken.
In 1977, I wrote a series of poems about a character, Black Bart, a former cattle rustler-turned-alchemist. A good friend, Claude Purdy, who is a stage director, suggested I turn the poems into a play.
When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.
After Jackie Robinson the most important black in baseball history is Reggie Jackson, I really mean that.
I am not merely a baseball player. I am a black man who has done what he wants, gotten what he wanted, and will continue to get it.
It's funny that black men, at first, were worried about a show called 'Girlfriends' because they thought that black men were gonna get bashed. They realized, 'Wait a minute - we're respected in this story.'
Bass Weejuns are the Cordovan black or brown penny loafers originally called Norwegian Loafers, hence their name. Worn without socks in the spring and summer, they must be kept to a high-gloss polish and should become burnished with wax over time until they have a fine patina.
I had left the music business and became a conflict journalist. The conflict journalism started for me in the Gulf and the oil spill. When Skynyrd needed a new bass player, they knew me from the Black Crowes.
What we witnessed in Ferguson, in Baltimore, and in Baton Rouge was a collapse of social order. So many of the actions of the Occupy movement and Black Lives Matter transcend peaceful protest and violates the code of conduct we rely on. I call it anarchy.
People see a 'South Park' episode, and there's racially insensitive jokes - nobody bats an eye because they're expecting that in that context. In hip-hop, they don't expect that kind of thing because it's a white person in a predominantly black world.
The only black battalion on Iwo Jima was a small munitions supply unit that came to the beach.
We are the only class in history that has been left to fight its battles alone, unaided by the ruling powers. White labor and the freed black men had their champions, but where are ours?
Without going outside his race, and even among the better classes with their 'white' culture and conscious American manners, but still Negro enough to be different, there is sufficient matter to furnish a black artist with a lifetime of creative work.
As a black woman in the industry, you really do have to hold your head higher, stick your chest out, be kind and polite and generous even when you don't want to be sometimes. I learned that and, also, just to never take no for an answer.
