Eunice Kathleen Waymon

«It had never occured to me to wonder how many black students there were studying at the Curtis Institute: it was a question I should have asked. The story that Carrol heard through my uncle and his friends, black and white, was that the Institute wanted to enrol black students, but if blacks were going to be admitted then they were not going to accept an unknown black, that if they were to accept an unknown black then it was not going to be an unknown black girl, and if they were going to admit an unknown black girl it wasn't going to be a very poor unknown black girl. People who knew - I was told - white people who knew, said the reason I was turned down was because I was black.
The wonderful thing about this type of discrimination is that you can never know for sure if it is true, because no one is going to turn around and admit to being a racist. They just say no, you got turned down because you weren't good enough and you'll never know. So you feel the shame, humiliation and anger at being another victim of prejudice and at the same time there's the nagging worry that maybe it isn't that at all, maybe it's because you're just no good. (…) One thing was for sure: I was finished with music.»