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" I'm trying to make the poems as musical as I can - from the inception. So that whether they're read on the page, or people read them aloud, or I read them aloud, the musicality will be kind of a given. "

Amiri Baraka

People

I Can

Be Kind

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" This is said to us, even as this counterfeit president has legalized the Confederate Flag in Mississippi. "

Amiri Baraka

Flag

Said

" I guess I was the most unbohemian of all bohemians. My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with - ... namely America... Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthyism and all those great things. "

" The man who buried Malcolm X - my Muslim imam, priest - he, after I got beat up by police... came to me, and he said, 'You don't need this American name.' And I was susceptible to it at the time because, God knows, I had just gotten whipped near to death. So he gave me an Arab name; he gave me the name Amir Barakat. "

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" A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom. "

Amiri Baraka

Cannot

Freedom

" My bohemianism consisted of not wanting to get involved with the stupid stuff that I thought people wanted you to get involved with... namely America... Dwight Eisenhower, McCarthyism and all those great things. "

" A rich man told me recently that a liberal is a man who tells other people what to do with their money. "

Amiri Baraka

Rich

People