- "All the courage and competitiveness of Jackie Robinson affects me to this day. If I patterned my life after anyone it was him, not because he was the first black baseball player in the majors but because he was a hero. "
-- Kareem Abdul-Jabbar - "I never thought of losing, but now that it's happened, the only thing is to do it right. That's my obligation to all the people who believe in me. We all have to take defeats in life."
-- Muhammad Ali statement after losing his first fight to Ken Norton, March 31, 1973 - "I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me."
-- Muhammad Ali The Greatest (1975) - "Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise."
-- Maya Angelou "Still I rise," And Still I Rise (1978) - "When you learn, teach. When you get, give. "
-- Maya Angelou - "Love is that condition in the human spirit so profound that it allows one to survive, and better than that, to thrive with passion, compassion, and style. "
-- Maya Angelou - "Man, if you gotta ask you'll never know."
-- Louis S. Armstrong (1900-1971) reply when asked what jazz is - "Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can."
-- Arthur Ashe quoted in Sports Illustrated - "All racists are irresponsible. "
-- James Baldwin - "People pay for what they do, and still more for what they have allowed themselves to become. And they pay for it very simply; by the lives they lead."
-- James BaldwinAfrican American Wisdom
by Reginald McKnight - collection of wisdom, reflections, and folk sayings by Americans of African descent includes the words of James Baldwin, Martin Luther King Jr., Bill Cosby, Harriet Tubman, and Zora Neale Hurston. - "Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated, and this was an immutable law. … I imagine that one of the reasons that people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with the pain."
-- James Baldwin - "If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves and allow those responsible to salve their conscience by believing that they have our acceptance and concurrence. We should, therefore, protest openly everything . . . that smacks of discrimination or slander."
-- Mary McLeod Bethune "Certain Unalienable Rights," What the Negro Wants - "If people believe that they are marrying out of love and free choice rather than out of duty, they are more likely to decide, if love should die, that the free choice to join together is no more significant than the free choice to part, and to look for love elsewhere; those married out of duty expect less love to begin with, and what duty has brought together, duty may keep together."
-- Stephen L. Carter, Integrity - "Just like you can buy grades of silk, you can buy grades of justice. "
-- Ray Charles - "The workings of the human heart are the profoundest mystery of the universe. One moment they make us despair of our kind, and the next we see in them the reflection of the divine image."
-- Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932) The Marrow of Tradition (1901) - "You're either part of the solution or part of the problem."
-- L. Eldridge Cleaver (1935-1998) speech given in San Francisco in 1968 - "There isn't a certain time we should set aside to talk about God. God is part of our every waking moment. "
-- Marva Collins - "The past is a ghost, the future a dream. All we ever have is now. "
-- Bill Cosby - "There is no labor a person does that is undignified; if they do it right."
-- Bill Cosby - "Life is short, and it's up to you to make it sweet."
-- Sadie Delany (1889-1999) Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years, written with sister Bessie Delany (1993) - "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..."
-- Frederick Douglass - "Once you have learned to read, you will be forever free."
-- Frederick Douglass - "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man."
-- Frederick Douglass - "The mind does not take its complexion from the skin. "
-- Frederick Douglass - "To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardship."
-- W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black FolkThe World of W.E.B. Du Bois : A Quotation Sourcebook
by Meyer Weinberg - contains more than 1,000 quotations in 20 different subject areas. - "It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others. . . . One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warrings ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder."
-- W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk - "I used to want the words "She tried" on my tombstone. Now I want "She did it.""
-- Katherine Dunham - "The question is not whether we can afford to invest in every child; it is whether we can afford not to."
-- Marian Wright Edelman - "People who make a living doing something they don't enjoy wouldn't even be happy with a one-day work week. "
-- Duke Ellington - "Our strength is that with the total society saying to us, No, No, No, No, we continue to move toward our goal. "
-- Ralph Ellison - "What's the best thing about being queen? Just being the queen, that's all... Being the Queen of Soul is a theatrical title. But at home, I'm the queen of my house, so, hey, I'm a domestic goddess. "
-- Aretha Franklin - "Our Constituion is colorblind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race ... is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with civil freedom."
-- Judge John Marshall Harlan in dissenting opinion on Plessy v. Fergeson, 1896 - "There will always be men struggling to change, and there will always be those who are controlled by the past."
-- Ernest J. Gaines - "God has blessed you when he lets you believe in somebody. "
-- Billie Holiday - "Don't threaten me with love, baby. Let's just go walking in the rain."
-- Billie Holiday - "I can't stand to sing the same song the same way two nights in succession, let alone two years or ten years. If you can, then it ain't music, it's close-order drill or exercise or yodeling or something, not music."
-- Billie Holiday - "If I don't have friends, then I ain't nothing."
-- Billie Holiday - "If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling."
-- Billie Holiday - "If you think dope is for kicks and for thrills, you're out of your mind. There are more kicks to be had in a good case of paralytic polio or by living in an iron lung."
-- Billie Holiday - "I'm always making a comeback but nobody ever tells me where I've been."
-- Billie Holiday - "I never had a chance to play with dolls like other kids. I started working when I was six years old."
-- Billie Holiday
Billie Holiday - "Mom & Pop were just a couple of kids when they got married. He was eighteen, she was sixteen and I was three."
-- Billie Holiday - "No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music."
-- Billie Holiday - "Singing songs like 'The Man I Love' or 'Porgy' is no more work than sitting down and eating Chinese roast duck, and I love roast duck."
-- Billie Holiday - "Somebody once said we never know what is enough until we know what's more than enough."
-- Billie Holiday - "Sometimes it's worse to win a fight than to lose."
-- Billie Holiday - "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."
-- Billie Holiday - "You can't copy anybody and end with anything. If you copy, it means you're working without any real feeling. No two people on earth are alike, and it's got to be that way in music or it isn't music."
-- Billie Holiday - "You've got to have something to eat and a little love in your life before you can hold still for any damn body's sermon on how to behave."
-- Billie Holiday - "What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?"
-- Langston Hughes, Harlem (1951) - "I am not tragically colored. There is no great sorrow dammed up in my soul, nor lurking behind my eyes. . . . Even in the helter-skelter skirmish that is my life, I have seen that the world is to the strong regardless of a little pigmentation more or less. No, I do not weep at the world—I am too busy sharpening my oyster knife."
-- Zora Neale Hurston, How It Feels to Be Colored Me (1928) - "Our nation is a rainbow—red, yellow, brown, black, and white—and we're all precious in God's sight."
-- Jesse Jackson in a speech given at the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco in 1984 - "We have come over a way that with tears has been watered, We have come, reading our path through the blood of the slaughtered."
-- James Weldon Johnson, Lift Every Voice and Sing - "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."
-- James Earl Jones, Voices and Silences - "Greatness occurs when your children love you, when your critics respect you and when you have peace of mind. "
-- Quincy Jones - "There is no obstacle in the path of young people who are poor or members of minority groups that hard work and preparation cannot cure."
-- Barbara Jordan - "If you're going to play the game [politics] properly, you'd better know every rule."
-- Barbara Jordan - "I live a day at a time. Each day I look for a kernel of excitement. In the morning, I say: 'What is my exciting thing for today?' Then, I do the day. Don't ask me about tomorrow."
-- Barbara Jordan - "We must exchange the philosophy of excuse -- what I am is beyond my control for the philosophy of responsibility."
-- Barbara Jordan - " Do not call for black power or green power. Call for brain power."
-- Barbara Jordan - ""We, the people." It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document [the Preamble to the US Constitution] was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787 I was not included in that "We, the people." I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton, just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in "We, the people.""
-- Barbara C. Jordan in a statement made before the House Committee on the Judiciary in 1974 - "I can accept failure. Everyone fails at something. But I can't accept not trying."
-- Michael Jordan - "You have to expect things of yourself before you can do them."
-- Michael Jordan
Michael Jordan - UNC - Last Shot 82 - "People don't pay much attention to you when you are second best. I wanted to see what it felt like to be number one. "
-- Florence Griffith Joyner - "Are you able to accept blows without retaliation? "
-- Martin Luther King, Jr. - "Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - "Free at Last!" "Let freedom ring. And when this happens, and when we allow freedom ring - when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children - black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics - will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: 'Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!'"
-- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., August 28, 1963 - "All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence. "
-- Martin Luther King, Jr. - "Anger, used, does not destroy. Hatred does."
-- Audre Lorde (1934-1992) "Eye to Eye," Sister Outsider - "The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself—the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us—that's where it's at."
-- Jesse Owens, Blackthink (1970) - "I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminshes fear."
-- Rosa Parks - "I have not had a quiet life, and I really could live without this publicity. I just want to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free and wanted others to be free."
-- Rosa Parks - "It's up to the individual how they feel about it -- it's not anything that can be forced on them."
-- Rosa Parks - "When someone stumbles, I don't believe in stomping on him. My philosophy is Pick 'em up, dust 'em off and get 'em moving again. "
-- Colin Powell - "Have a vision. Be demanding. "
-- Colin Powell - "Be black, shine, aim high. "
-- Leontyne Price - "God gives nothing to those who keep their arms crossed. "
-- African Proverb - "Freedom is never given; it is won."
-- A. Philip Randolph in keynote speech given at the Second National Negro Congress in 1937 - "It is a dangerous thing to ask why someone else has been given more. It is humbling~and indeed healthy~to ask why you have been given so much. "
-- Condoleezza Rice - "My father was a slave and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?"
-- Paul Robeson during testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956 - "It cannot be denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and oppressed—this, despite the gospel."
-- Howard Thurman - "When I found I had crossed that line, [on her first escape from slavery, 1845] I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything."
-- Harriet Tubman - "Sometimes you've got to let everything go—purge yourself . . . If you are unhappy with anything . . . whatever is bringing you down, get rid of it. Because you'll find that when you're free, your true creativity, your true self comes out."
-- Tina Turner - "Any god I ever felt in church I brought with me. And I think all the other folks did too. They came to church to share God, not find God."
-- Alice Walker, The Color Purple - "Expect nothing. Live frugally On surprise. "
-- Alice Walker - "From any point of view, I had rather be what I am, a member of the Negro race, than be able to claim membership with the most favored of any other race. ! "
-- Booker T. Washington - "Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."
-- Booker T. WashingtonThen Darkness Fled: The Liberating Wisdom of Booker T. Washington
(Leaders in Action Series) by Stephen Mansfield . - "There are many brave African-Americans. They need to be inspired by those of us who have a platform. "
-- Maxine Waters - "I felt that one had better die fighting against injustice than to die like a dog or rat in a trap. I had already determined to sell my life as dearly as possible if attacked. I felt if I could take one lyncher with me, this would even up the score a little bit."
-- Ida B. Wells - "Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land."
-- Cornel West, Race Matters - "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."
-- Cornel West, Race Matters - "For nobler themes, demand a nobler strain, And purer language on the ethereal plain. "
-- Phillis Wheatley - "For every one of us that succeeds, it's because there's somebody there to show you the way out."
-- Oprah WinfreyAfrican American Quotations...
This extensive collection contains more than 2,500 quotations from over 500 notable figures as George Washington Carver, Malcolm X, Marcus Garvey, Jesse Jackson, Mary McLeod Bethune, James Baldwin, Oprah Winfrey, and Alice Walker. - "I still have my feet on the ground, I just wear better shoes."
-- Oprah Winfrey - "We all have ability. The difference is how we use it."
-- Stevie Wonder - "We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice."
-- Carter Woodson on founding Negro History Week, 1926 - "The differences between black folk and white folk are not blood or color, and the ties that bind us are deeper than those that separate us. The common road of hope which we all traveled has brought us into a stronger kinship than any words, laws, or legal claims."
-- Richard Wright, 12 Million Black Voices - "My hope for my children must be that they respond to the still, small voice of God in their own hearts."
-- Andrew Young - "The truth is that there is nothing noble in being superior to somebody else. The only real nobility is in being superior to your former self."
-- Whitney Young
RELATED RESOURCES
Black History Month Resource Book
From Slavery to Freedom:
A History of African Americans
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