Best 199 quotes in «black history quotes» category

I will always remember my delight when Mrs. Georgia Gilmore - an unlettered woman of unusual intelligence - told how an operator demanded that she get off the bus after paying her fare and board it again by the back door, and then drove away before she could get there. She turned to Judge Carter and said: "When they count the money, they do not know Negro money from white money.

Just like you can buy grades of silk, you can buy grades of justice.

Let us not become the evil that we deplore.

Many of us in Nashville accepted nonviolence as a way of life, a way of living, not simply as a technique or a tactic.

Never before has the seductive market way of life held such sway in nearly every sphere of American life. This marketing way of life promotes addictions to stimulation and obsessions with comfort and convenience ... centered primarily around bodily pleasures and status rankings. ... The common denominator is a rugged and ragged individualism and rapacious hedonism in quest of a perennial "high" in body and mind.

Never, never rest contented with any circle of ideas, but always be certain that a wider one is still possible.

No library of American business achievement is complete without the story of Arthur G. Gaston. . . . Black Titan is a long overdue contribution to the recording of not just black history, but American history.

My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.

One of the things I recognized early on, doing whatever studies of black history I have, is that even though black folks were transported as slaves, into servitude, when they were carried out of Africa they left empty-handed, but they didn't leave empty-headed. They carried with them the culture they knew, the culture they had, and that culture reconstituted itself in all the places they went.

Phillip Roth uses his Black women characters to make anti intellectual remarks about Black history month, begun by a man who reached intellectual heights that Roth will never attain. Roth is a petty bigot and his ignorant remarks about black culture expose him as a buffoon to scholars the world over.

Prejudice doesn't make me mad. It just - I guess 'pisses me off' is the word.

I will not take 'but' for an answer. Negroes have been looking at democracy's 'but' too long.

No race has a monopoly on vice or virtue, and the worth of an individual is not related to the color of his skin.

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

No time to marry, no time to settle down; I'm a young woman, and I ain't done runnin' around.

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.

Racism is man's gravest threat to man - the maximum of hatred for a minimum of reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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.

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

[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.

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

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

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

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

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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

What's shaking, chiefy baby?

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

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 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.

You really can change the world if you care enough.

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

$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.

...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.

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.