Best 199 quotes in «black history quotes» category

Slowly we have lifeted ourselves by our own bootstraps. Step by halting step, we have beat our way back

The great thing about serving the poor is that there is no competition.

The kind of beauty I want most is the hard-to-get kind that comes from within - strength, courage, dignity.

The problem with hatred and violence is that they intensity the fears of the white majority, and leave them less ashamed of their prejudices toward Negroes.

There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.

There is no negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution

The Republican Party's history is rich and chock full of emancipation and black history.

The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.

There is such a thing as the freedom of exhaustion. Some people are so worn down by the yoke of oppression that they give up. [...] The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. [...] To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right.

The truest writers are those who see language not as a linguistic process but as a living element.

There are times in life when, instead of complaining, you do something about your complaints.

They oughtta change Black History Month to Black Progress Month and start measuring it.

Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.

The world is a severe schoolmaster, for its frowns are less dangerous than its smiles and flatteries, and it is a difficult task to keep in the path of wisdom.

The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.

[W]e are the heirs of a past of rope, fire, and murder. I for one am not ashamed of this past. My shame is for those who became so inhuman that they could inflict this torture upon us.

We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, treading our path through the blood of the slaughtered.

We intend to make this world the most beautiful, glorious planet that any human being can imagine and, really, beyond anything any human being can imagine.

We may explain success mainly by one word and that word is WORK! WORK!! WORK!!! WORK!!!!

We do as much, we eat as much, we want as much.

When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language.

We black men seem the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars and smartness.

When the Negro was completely an underdog, he needed white spokesmen. Liberals played their parts in this period exceedingly well.... But now that the Negro has rejected his role as an underdog, he has become more assertive in his search for identity and group solidarity; he wants to speak for himself.

What's shaking, chiefy baby?

Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, . . . neither persons nor property will be safe.

When I was six, God was a white man with a big beard riding on a white cloud. That's the image television pumps.

When you have a large amount of the workforce being laid off, some of them have no other choice but to go out there and invent something.

You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation.

Won't it be wonderful when black history and native American history and Jewish history and all of U.S. history is taught from one book. Just U.S. history.

you must never be fearful about what you are doing when it is right.

You must change in order to survive.

You really can change the world if you care enough.

$1,200, That was the price of a man in those days. Now you can call him black, or you can call him a slave, but he was a man nonetheless.

A conquering force sustained the old folks and now centers us. Forming a collective of comeback saints, let us rally behind them and move forward. We’re called to a new awakening and application of what we’ve learned from those who’ve “looked over Jordan.

A government offering such bounty to builders and lenders could have required compliance with a nondiscrimination policy. Instead, the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been culled from the Nuremberg laws.

All white people, I think, are implicated in these things so long as we participate in America in a normal way and attempt to go on leading normal lives while any one race is being cheated and tormented. But I now believe that we will probably go on leading our normal lives, and will go on participating in our nation in a normal way, unless there comes a time where Negroes can compel us by methods of extraordinary pressure to interrupt our pleasure.

A lot of elders complain that they do not know what is wrong with today's black generation. I beg to ask them what was wrong with theirs? Children don't become what you want, they become who you are. Our elders should reflect upon what went wrong during the era when today's young adults were children. Maybe just maybe they might find the answers to the problems of this "generation". They are equally responsible for this "money over everything mindset that breeds the young people they condemn.They raised a world of children who know the price of everything but the value of nothing. A money grabbing, instant gratification over profundity seeking and "step pon them" culture of people.

A man who tosses worms in the river isn’t 't necessarily a friend of the fish. All the fish who take him for a friend, who think the worm’s got no hook in it, usually end up in the frying pan.

American slavery was specifically racist slavery. It could not exist apart from racism, and could not be separated from it. Slavery was a massive institution, but its evil was only enabled by the constraints of law and power. Change the law, and you can end the slaver, for the slavery rested on law. But racism rests in the heart and mind. You can change laws, but changing hearts is a whole different matter. Once the slavery was taken away, the racism still existed. The hearts of millions of whiles hated and despised blacks just as before, only now even more so. Now they would have the added insult of an occupying government and military force attempting to make them live as equals - politically at the very least. If the racism remained, unrepentant and unhealed - and it certainly did - the evil would only manifest in a new way.

...and I think about living in a place that’s chock full of History and devoid of memory. I think about how it’s impossible for a nation to have a conscience if it doesn’t have a memory.

Antiblack violencein Chicago was common since at least the 189-s, when blacks were brought in as strikebreakers. The violence grew with the black population. In the two years leading up to mid-July 1919, whhites bombed more than twenty-five homes and properties owned by blacks in white areas...One bombing killed a little girl...The police never arrested anyone, infuriating blacks.

You're either part of the solution or you're part of the problem.

As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s 'the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.'

Any ministry to black people which is not designed to effect their empowerment is designed to perpetuate their enslavement.

Besides the moral courage required to accept commissions in the Fifty-fourth at the time it was organizing, physical courage was also necessary, for the Confederate Congress, on May 1, 1863, passed an act, a potion of which read as follow: - Section IV. That every white person being a commissioned officer, or acting as such, who, during the present war, shall command negroes or mulattoes in arms against the Confederate States, or who shall arm, train, organize, or prepare negroes or mulattoes for military service against the Confederate States, or who shall voluntarily aid negroes or mulattoes in any military enterprise, attack, or conflict in such service, shall be deemed as inciting servile insurrection, and shall, if captured, be put to death or be otherwise punished at the discretion of the Court.

A woman without no options is waitin for a man to come by an ruin her.

But when they brought Sabira out, the crowd parted almost magically. A sea of hands rose faster than a swell and a bidding war commenced, amongst these civilized gentlemen who made their living off the backs of slaves.

...After all, acknowledging unfairness then calls decent people forth to correct those injustices. And since most persons are at their core, decent folks, the need to ignore evidence of injustice is powerful: To do otherwise would force whites to either push for change (which they would perceive as against their interests) or live consciously as hypocrites who speak of freedom and opportunity but perpetuate a system of inequality. The irony of American history is the tendency of good white Americanas to presume racial innocence. Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state.

Black people are not the descendants of kings. We are—and I say this with big pride—the progeny of slaves. If there’s any majesty in our struggle, it lies not in fairy tales but in those humble origins and the great distance we’ve traveled since. Ditto for the dreams of a separate but noble past. Cosby’s, and much of black America’s, conservative analysis flattens history and smooths over the wrinkles that have characterized black America since its inception.