Toni Cade Bambara was an influential African American author, activist, and filmmaker who wrote about the struggles of the civil rights movement. This quote appears in her essay “The Scattered Sopranos,” delivered as a lecture during a Black women’s seminar at Livingstone College in 1969. With this line, she observed that radical change must start with caring for ourselves and our loved ones. "If your house is not in order, you ain't in order," she wrote. "It is so much easier to be out there than right here."