James McBride

Whatever he believed, he believed. It didn’t matter to him whether it was really true or not. He just changed the truth till it fit him. He was a real white man.

— James McBride

I asked her if I was black or white. She replied "You are a human being. Educate yourself or you'll be a nobody!

— James McBride

We would not have been a successful family without my father and stepfather, who were working-class men with better dreams for their children. We just wore them out.

— James McBride

We would not have been a successful family without my father and stepfather, who were working-class men with better dreams for their children. We just wore them out.

— James McBride

I asked her who he was and she said, “He was a man ahead of his time.” She actually liked Malcolm X. She put him in nearly the same category as her other civil rights heroes, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys—any Kennedy. When Malcolm X talked about “the white devil” Mommy simply felt those references didn’t apply to her.

— James McBride