Quotes about black-history
Stephanie Lahart -
Don’t be so hard on yourself. Be perfectly okay with being who YOU are. Fully embrace yourself, flaws and all. Love yourself right where you are. Strive to do better, but don’t beat yourself up for every shortcoming that you may have. Be brave in your journey! Hold your head up high, and keep moving forward.
Jay-Z - Decoded
I'm here to tell niggas it ain't all swell.There's Heaven then there's Hell niggasOne day your cruisin' in your seven,Next day your sweatin', forgettin' your lies,Alibis ain't matchin' up, bullshit catchin' upHit with the RICO, they repoed your vehicleEverything was all good just a week ago'Bout to start bitchin' ain't you?Ready to start snitchin' ain't you?I forgive you. Weak ass, hustlin' just ain't youAside from the fast carsHoneys that shake they ass in barsYou know you wouldn't be involvedW
Deborah L. Parker - Tools to Cultivate the Promised Land: Working Wisdom from My Grandparents' Garden
Plus I have no doubt that their garden is also where my grandparents dreamed—for a better life of equality for their grandchildren and future generations. As people rooted in their faith, they probably did a lot of praying here as well, that God would deliver us all to prosperity and peace beyond this plot of land.
Ta-Nehisi Coates - Between the World and Me
[whiteness] has no real meaning divorced from the machinery of criminal power. The new people were something else before they were white—Catholic, Corsican, Welsh, Mennonite, Jewish—and if all our national hopes have any fulfillment, then they will have to be something else again. Perhaps they will truly become American and create a nobler basis for their myth. I cannot call it. As for now, it must be said that the process of washing the disparate tribes white, the elevation of the belief in bei
Deborah L. Parker - and Spirit: Seven Guidelines for Life & Career Success
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.
Deborah L. Parker - and Spirit: Seven Guidelines for Life & Career Success
Our stories are timeless and tested. They are about us, a people of tremendous strength.Our songs are full of love and life— and the ups and downs of both. They are soulful with the rhythms of a heart that is in sync with nature and wonderment. Our struggles are real and rugged. They beckon our memory to the highest callings of the spirit, to help us rejoice and to overcome.
Jay Grewal - A Slave to Want
He broke me down past the flesh, past the muscle, past the bone, down to my soul and in a loud provocation, he asked, “What are you made of?”After I gathered the broken bits and pieces of my life together, I shouted at the top of my lungs, “HOPE! Unbreakable, undeniable, irrevocable hope!
Jay Grewal - A Slave to Want
If you stay on this path as long as I have, you’ll soon learn that the road to providence leads right through perdition. And along that road, the devil’s waiting to collect his pound of flesh.
Barbara Jordan - We Rise: Speeches by Inspirational Black Women
We believe in equality for all, and privileges for none. This is a belief that each American regardless of background has equal standing in the public forum, all of us. Because we believe this idea so firmly, we are an inclusive, rather than an exclusive party. Let everybody come.
Michelle Alexander - The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
Vagrancy laws and other laws defining activities such as "mischief" and "insulting gestures" as crimes were enforced vigorously against blacks. The aggressive enforcement of these criminal offenses opened up an enormous market for convict leasing.
Malcolm X -
Thoughtful white people know they are inferior to black people. Anyone who has studied the genetic phase of biology knows that white is considered recessive and black is considered dominant. When you want strong coffee, you ask for black coffee. If you want it light, you want it weak, integrated with white milk. Just like these Negroes who weaken themselves and their race by this integrating and intermixing with whites. If you want bread with no nutritional value, you ask for white bread. All th
Malcolm X -
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.
Malcolm X -
No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society. They’re robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it’s the truth. They are a black body with a white brain.
David T. Hardy - Michael Moore Is a Big Fat Stupid White Man
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.'
Tim Wise -
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.
Tim Wise -
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.
Tim Wise -
...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 Americ
W.E.B. Du Bois - Black Reconstruction in America 1860-1880
One reads the truer deeper facts of Reconstruction with a great despair. It is at once so simple and human, and yet so futile. There is no villain, no idiot, no saint. There are just men; men who crave ease and power, men who know want and hunger, men who have crawled. They all dream and strive with ecstasy of fear and strain of effort, balked of hope and hate. Yet the rich world is wide enough for all, wants all, needs all. So slight a gesture, a word, might set the strife in order, not with fu
Tony Williams - and the Epidemic That Changed America's Destiny
Black seamen - or "Black Jacks" as African sailors were known - enjoyed a refreshing world of liberty and equality. Even if they were generally regulated to jobs such as cooks, servants, and muscians and endured thier fellow seamen's racism, they were still freemen in the Royal Navy. One famous black sailor wrote, "I liked this little ship very much. I now became the captian's steward, in which I was very happy; for I was extremely well treated by all on board, and I had the leisure to improve m
Ta-Nehisi Coates - We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
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.
Bonnie Greer - A Parallel Life
The official erasure of any existence before enslavement – as if black Americans did not exist before the yolk and the chains and whip – has always created a passion for us.Black people need to find out. We have to find out Who We Are and Where We Come From.
Abhijit Naskar - We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
Sentiments that glorify humanity know no racial distinction.
Abhijit Naskar - We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
Call up the ever-pure, the effulgent and the ever-radiant character of true humanism in yourself and in others, and no racism shall have the power to thrive in such society even for a few seconds.
Abhijit Naskar - We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
Tolstoy was a Caucasian, Gandhi was an Asian, and Martin Luther King Jr. was a Negro, yet all of their hearts were inspired by the one idea of nonviolent resistance. King received it from Gandhi, Gandhi received it from Tolstoy, and Tolstoy received it from Christ.
Abhijit Naskar - We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
It is character that should be the sole measure of judgement in the society of thinking humanity, and nothing short of that would do.
Abhijit Naskar - We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
If not as a true human, let me tell you as a Biologist, color of the skin does not define an individual’s intelligence – it does not define an individual’s ambitions - it does not define an individual’s dreams – and above all, it does not define an individual’s character.
Abhijit Naskar - We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
In the biological sense, race does not exist.
Abhijit Naskar - We Are All Black: A Treatise on Racism
If origin defines race, then we are all Africans – we are all black.
Andrena Sawyer -
To my Black brothers and sisters, choose faith. As difficult as it is, choose faith—the kind of faith that we know without works is dead. The faith that raises awareness, educates the community, advocates, cares for the widows and feeds the orphans. Choose the faith that is compelled to action, but not controlled my anger.
Jay Grewal - A Slave to Want
How a member of the church—one who had read the Good Lord’s bible—could sit so calmly and watch a man be led to his destruction frightened me.
Angela Flournoy - The Turner House
A woman without no options is waitin for a man to come by an ruin her.
Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Case for Reparations
Won't reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say - that American propserity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.
Lyndon B. Johnson -
Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences - deep, corrosive, obstinate differences - radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.
Habeeb Akande -
It's ironic when black non-Muslims say Islam is not a religion that uplifts black people when two of the most celebrated black heroes in recent history were both Muslim Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali.
Qwana Reynolds-Frasier - Friend In Your Pocket Conversations Session One
GREAT THINGS COME OUT OF LONELINESSLIKE INSPIRATION THAT BRINGS PEOPLE TOGETHER!
Kaitlyn Greenidge - Charlie Freeman
Marie's loud protestations about the lack of black history celebrations in town had resulted in a sheepish and hastily thrown together assembly each year at the public library, where all the while children and Adia sang praises to peanuts and open-heart surgery and air-conditioning underneath a store-printed banner that read THE WONDERS OF BLACK INNOVATION.
Phrase painted on the side of the plane flown by Eugene Bullard in World War I the first black comba -
All blood runs red.
Jay Grewal - A Slave to Want
I couldn’t figure out if it was fate or faith that had brought me there. How funny those two words sounded when paired together. One was the inevitable, something I could not change in my life, while the other was the hope and belief that I could. These two words were enemies of each other, and one of them was down right dangerous for a slave to have anywhere near his mind.
Jay Grewal - A Slave to Want
That was when I realized we weren’t born to beslaves. It was ignorant for any man to think he could be the master of another. We were all meant to be free, and somewhere there were good people helping to heal this broken world.
Jay Grewal - A Slave to Want
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.
Angela Flournoy - The Turner House
There ain't no haints in Detroit.
Alex Hartley Jr. -
TRUE Hebrew Israelites DO NOT hate white people.TRUE Hebrew Israelites DO NOT have more than one wife.TRUE Hebrew Israelites DO NOT smoke marijuana or do any other types of drugsTRUE Hebrew Israelites DO NOT have to stand on corners Intimidating people into believing the way.
Angela Flournoy - The Turner House
You got a child to feed and a life to get on with.
Luis Fenollosa Emilio - 1863-1865
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
Luffina Lourduraj -
You have a color of your own- Dark chocolate,You have a culture your own- Hip pop,You have a revival of your own- Harlem Renaissance,You are the spot on a ladybug that adds its beauty,You are the pupil of an eye,You are the vastness of space,You are the richness of soil,You are the sweetness of dark chocolate,You are the mystery in nature,Blessed Black chocolate, God has made You to rule the Land, that made You a slave.
Pero Gaglo Dagbovie -
What these thinkers, chroniclers, and interpreters have written about, how they have theorized their scholarly endeavors, and their approaches and methodologies have inevitably been informed and shaped by the times in which they existed.
Malcolm X -
When Pope Pius XII died, LIFE magazine carried a picture of him in his private study kneeling before a black Christ. What was the source of their information? All white people who have studied history and geography know that Christ was a black man. Only the poor, brainwashed American Negro has been made to believe that Christ was white, to maneuver him into worshiping the white man. After becoming a Muslim in prison, I read almost everything I could put my hands on in the prison library. I began
Janelle Gray - Echoes of the Struggle
Back then, Black churches were a small piece of peace. Church was a world where, even with its imperfections, the offer of equality and common humanity was the sustenance needed to make it through the rest of the week in a society that deemed them less than human.
R.H. Sin -
I'm hurting because the color of my skin makes me perfect for their target practice.
R.H. Sin -
every time this happensI see my fathermy brothermy would be sonI see myselfstop killing us
Cristina García - Dreaming in Cuban
The war that killed my grandfather and great-uncles and thousands of other blacks is only a footnote in our history books.
Janelle Gray - Echoes of the Struggle
I watched as people went to the memorial reading the names. I started at the first entry from 1954. I read each one quietly but out loud to myself, like I’d done with the names of those in the museum. I felt somehow they were getting the message that their sacrifice was known and their voice was heard.
Margot Lee Shetterly - Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win t
What I wanted was for them to have a grand, sweeping narrative that they deserved, the kind of American history that belongs to the Wright Brothers and the astronauts, to Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King Jr. Not told as a separate history, but as part of the story we all know. Not at the margins, but at the very center, the protagonists of the drama. And not just because they are black, or because they are women, but because they are part of the American epic.
James Baldwin - The Fire Next Time
You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason. The limits of your ambition were, thus, expected to be set forever. You were born into a society which spelled out with brutal clarity, and in as many ways as possible, that you were a worthless human being. You are not expected to aspire to excellence: you were expected to make peace with mediocrity.
Chinonye J. Chidolue -
Oh Maker, what did they really say about your black creation? I think you made a beautiful work of art on a canvass of rebellion. Hey, Maker! We are still selling out!
Qwana Reynolds-Frasier - Friend In Your Pocket Conversations Session One
IF YOU AIN'T RAISING THE VIBRATION YOU ARE KILLING THE VIBE!
Qwana Reynolds-Frasier - Friend In Your Pocket Conversations Session One
IF SOMEONE KEEPS DOING WHAT THEY'RE DOINGTHEY WILL GET BETTER AT IT, BUT.... THEY STILL WON'T BE BETTER THEN YOU!KEEP PUSHING!
Brandi L. Bates - Remains To Be Seen
THE NEXT DAY WAS RAIN-SOAKED and smelled of thick sweet caramel, warm coconut and ginger. A nearby bakery fanned its daily offerings. A lapis lazuli sky was blanketed by gunmetal gray clouds as it wept crocodile tears across the parched Los Angeles landscape.When Ivy was a child and she overheard adults talking about their break-ups, in her young feeble-formed mind, she imagined it in the most literal of essences. She once heard her mother speaking of her break up with an emotionally unavailable
Margot Lee Shetterly - Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win t
There was virtually no aspect of twentieth-century defense technology that had not been touched by the hands and minds of female mathematicians.
Lorene Stunson Hill - To Dance with Ugly People
To paraphrase Forrest Gump, "Ugly is, as Ugly does!
Kingsley Opuwari Manuel -
The validation of your dreams is not in the colour of your skin but in the quality of your heart.
Ta-Nehisi Coates - The Case for Reparations
To celebrate freedom and democracy while forgetting American's origins in a slavery economy is patriotism à la carte.
Assata Shakur - Assata: An Autobiography
I'm not quite sure what freedom is, but i know damn well what it ain't. How have we gotten so silly, i wonder.
Lorene Cary - Black Ice
Not one thought entered my head that did not seem disloyal. I was ashamed, seeing their pride close up, as if for the first time, at how little I had accomplished, how much I had failed to do at St. Paul's. Somewhere in the last two years I had forgotten my mission. What had I done, I kept thinking, that was worthy of their faith? How had I helped my race? How had I prepared myself for a meaningful future? ... They were right: only a handful of us got this break. I wanted to shout at them that I
Lorene Cary - Black Ice
I had not expected the gentle, tentative surge of gratitude I began to feel...for St. Paul's School, the spring, and the early morning. I needed the morning light and the warbling birds. I needed to find a way to live in this place for a moment and get the good of it. I had tried to hold myself apart, and the aloneness proved more terrible than what I had tried to escape.