Top 61 Carter G. Woodson Quotes

#1. No people can go forward when the majority of those who should know better have chosen to go backward, but this is exactly what most of our misleaders do.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #41932
#2. And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #96000
#3. In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #97587
#4. The only question which concerns us here is whether these "educated" persons are actually equipped to face the ordeal before them or unconsciously contribute to their own undoing by perpetuating the regime of the oppressor.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #164928
#5. The author takes the position that the consumer pays the tax, and as such every individual of the social order should be given unlimited opportunity to make the most of himself.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #235315
#6. The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #257320
#7. Our aim is to appeal to reason. ... Prayer is not one of our remedies; it depends on what one is praying for. We consider prayer nothing more than a fervent wish; consequently the merit and worth of a prayer depend upon what the fervent wish is.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #260970
#8. History shows that it does not matter who is in power or what revolutionary forces take over the government, those who have not learned to do for themselves and have to depend solely on others never obtain any more rights or privileges in the end than they had in the beginning.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #265852
#9. It may be well to repeat here the saying that old men talk of what they have done, young men of what they are doing, and fools of what they expect to do. The Negro race has a rather large share of the last mentioned class.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #293796
#10. We have a wonderful history behind us ... If you are unable to demonstrate to the world that you have this record, the world will say to you, 'You are not worthy to enjoy the blessings of democracy or anything else'.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #294380
#11. Some of the American whites, moreover, are just as far behind in this respect as are the Negroes who have had less opportunity to learn better.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #332298
#12. This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift; it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #360807
#13. Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #369099
#14. This crusade is much more important than the anti- lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #386069
#15. To handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. It kills one's aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #410439
#16. And crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples. The Negro thus educated is a hopeless liability of the race.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #449648
#17. Let us banish fear.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #476237
#18. In fact, the confidence of the people is worth more than money.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #512794
#19. The education of the Negroes, then, the most important thing in the uplift of the Negroes, is almost entirely in the hands of those who have enslaved them and now segregate them.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #594566
#20. They still have some money, and they have needs to supply. They must begin immediately to pool their earnings and organize industries to participate in supplying social and economic demands.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #603416
#21. If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #614189
#22. If the white man wants to hold on to it, let him do so; but the Negro, so far as he is able, should develop and carry out a program of his own.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #701288
#23. If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #720742
#24. Pecuniary embarrassment, he thought, was the cause of all evil to the blacks, for poverty kept them ignorant and their lack of enlightenment kept them degraded.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #736414
#25. The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #745426
#26. In the long run, there is not much discrimination against superior talent.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #746720
#27. Truth comes to us from the past, then, like gold washed down from the mountains.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #771575
#28. The bondage of the Negro brought captive from Africa is one of the greatest dramas in history, and the writer who merely sees in that ordeal something to approve or condemn fails to understand the evolution of the human race.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #804246
#29. One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #910469
#30. In schools of theology Negroes are taught the interpretation of the Bible worked out by those who have justified segregation and winked at the economic debasement of the Negro at times almost to the point of starvation.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #930992
#31. Exploitation of the Negro through economic restriction and segregation the present system is sound and will doubtless continue until this gives place to the saner policy of actual interracial cooperation
not the present farce of racial manipulation in which the Negro is a figurehead.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #999229
#32. As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1024598
#33. The mere imparting of information is not education.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1029140
#34. The strongest bank in the United States will last only so long as the people will have sufficient confidence in it to keep their money there.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1059359
#35. We do not show the Negro how to overcome segregation, but we teach him how to accept it as final and just.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1061722
#36. 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 G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1121778
#37. They are anxious to have everything the white man has even if it is harmful.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1150454
#38. Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1219072
#39. The oppressor has always indoctrinated the weak with his interpretation of the crimes of the strong.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1224832
#40. I am not afraid of being sued by white businessmen. In fact, I should welcome such a law suit.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1246425
#41. If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1272025
#42. At this moment, then, the Negroes must begin to do the very thing which they have been taught that they cannot do.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1293340
#43. The same educational process which inspires and stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished everything worth while, depresses

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1326345
#44. Negro banks, as a rule, have failed because the people, taught that their own pioneers in business cannot function in this sphere, withdrew their deposits.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1377270
#45. You must give your own story to the world.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1408234
#46. Let us banish fear. We have been in this mental state for three centuries. I am a radical. I am ready to act, if I can find brave men to help me.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1422703
#47. The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1424899
#48. Truth must be dug up from the past and presented to the circle of scholastics in scientific form and then through stories and dramatizations that will permeate our educational system.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1482843
#49. Our most widely known scholars have been trained in universities outside of the South.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1493633
#50. The different ness of races, moreover, is no evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not possess.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1509786
#51. Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1512586
#52. The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1557327
#53. Cooperation implies equality of the participants in the particular task at hand.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1608086
#54. The race needs workers, not leaders.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1620933
#55. If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1660012
#56. Negroes who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities for development are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1695045
#57. For me, education means to inspire people to live more abundantly, to learn to begin with life as they find it and make it better.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1716155
#58. It is strange, then, that the friends of truth and the promoters of freedom have not risen up against the present propaganda in the schools and crushed it.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1738627
#59. HISTORY shows, then, that as a result of these unusual forces in the education of the Negro he easily learns to follow the line of least resistance rather than battle against odds for what real history has shown to be the right course.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1753787
#60. No man knows what he can do until he tries.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1866072
#61. The real servant of the people must live among them, think with them, feel for them, and die for them.

Carter G. Woodson

Carter G. Woodson Quotes #1871651

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