Johnnetta B. Cole Quotes

#1. Crisis' seems to be too mild a word to describe conditions in countless African-American communities. It is beyond crisis when in the richest nation in the world, African Americans in Harlem live shorter lives than the people of Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations of the world.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#2. The trouble with a woman standing behind her man is that she can't see where she is going!

Johnnetta B. Cole

#3. If we center our lives on BMWs, RVs, VCRs, PCs and the other acronyms of consumerism, we cannot expect our children to do otherwise.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#4. If folks can learn to be racist, then they can learn to be anti racist. If being sexist ain't genetic, then, dad gum, people can learn about gender equality.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#5. Faced with what seems like an impossible task, a group of folks will do well to remember the African proverb: When spider webs unite they can tie up a lion.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#6. While it is true that without a vision the people perish, it is doubly true that without action the people and their vision perish as well.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#7. Racism is alive and doing too well in America.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#8. The ultimate expression of generosity is not in giving of what you have, but in giving of who you are.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#9. The histories of the poor and the powerless are as important as those of their conquerors, their colonizers, their kings and queens.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#10. The woman who bore me is no longer alive, but I seem to be her daughter in increasingly profound ways.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#11. I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#12. There are not many of us African American Sister Presidents, and those of us who are in this field do not have an easy time of it. Why the story goes that one Black woman college president died and went to hell, and it was two weeks before she realized that she wasn't still on the job.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#13. Show me someone content with mediocrity and I'll show you someone destined for failure.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#14. The myth of black women profiting at the expense of black men is the oldest rap around.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#15. Now, if you want to know my secret love, it is to be able to serve as an example.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#16. The more we pull together toward a new day, the less it matters what pushed us apart in the past.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#17. What you give ought to be in direct relationship to what you've received. If you have been blessed with a great deal, then you have a lot of giving to do.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#18. You cannot fully understand your own life without knowing and thinking beyond your life, your own neighborhood, and even your own nation.

Johnnetta B. Cole

#19. The content of the curriculum should never exclude the realities of the very students who must intellectually wrestle with it. When students study all worlds except their own, they are miseducated.

Johnnetta B. Cole