“[I want my legacy to be] that I hung in there. That I didn’t say, ‘I can’t.’ I had a Spartan upbringing, but I thank [my mother] for it. It made me strong. My mother said, ‘You can.’ She didn’t say, ‘You poor, little colored child, you can’t do anything.’ She said, ‘You can.’”

—DOROTHY WEST

Dorothy West (June 2, 1907 – August 16, 1998) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and magazine editor associated with the Harlem Renaissance, a cultural movement in the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated black art, literature, and music. Wikipedia