Black American History Quotes

#1. It is imperative that young white men and women study the black American history. It is imperative that blacks and whites study the Asian American history.

Maya Angelou

#2. The acceptance of the facts of African-American history and the African-American historian as a legitimate part of the academic community did not come easily. Slavery ended and left its false images of black people intact.

John Henrik Clarke

#3. 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.

Jay Grewal

#4. 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.

Pero Gaglo Dagbovie

#5. The white economic and political elite often failed to recognize blacks as American, just as blacks often failed to recognize their potential for advancement outside of the limited opportunities afforded them by whites.

W.E.B. Du Bois

#6. 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.

Habeeb Akande

#7. [Clyde Ross] was stationed in California. He found that he could go into stores without being bothered. He could walk the streets without being harassed. He could go into a restaurant and receive service.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#8. In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#9. For me going down in history being the first black American to win the gold, I think more colored people are going to start coming to the gymnastics world and say 'okay, anything is possible. If Gabby did it, then I can do it too.'

Gabby Douglas

#10. Black history is American history.

Morgan Freeman

#11. 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.

Jay Grewal

#12. Black history isn't a separate history. This is all of our history, this is American history, and we need to understand that. It has such an impact on kids and their values and how they view black people.

Karyn Parsons

#13. 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

#14. I don't want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.

Morgan Freeman

#15. That was when I realized we weren't born to be
slaves. 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

#16. 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.

Earl G. Graves, Sr.

#17. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#18. It somehow became an article of faith on the right that Obama is the most extreme president in American history. Although, when they say that, I think what they really mean is ... he's black.

Bill Maher

#19. Slavery was immensely profitable to some masters. James Madison told a British visitor shortly after the American Revolution that he could make 257 dollars on every (black slave) in a year, and spend only 12 or 13 dollars on his keep.

Howard Zinn

#20. 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.

Charles Abrams

#21. This feeling African-Americans have, this skepticism towards the police and the skepticism that the police show towards African-Americans is actually quite old. And it may be one of the most durable aspects of the relationship between black people and their country really in our history.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#22. $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.

Jay Grewal

#23. When I was a child, to call someone 'black' was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fight.
But to me it contains all of the history of oppression and resistance, of being close to the soil and the sky, of plain speaking. Of The Journey.

Bonnie Greer

#24. North Lawndale's Jewish People's Institute actively encouraged blacks to move into the neighborhood, seeking to make it a 'pilot community for interracial living.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#25. Is it possible for white America to really understand blacks' distrust of the legal system, their fears of racial profiling and the police, without understanding how cheap a black life was for so long a time in our nation's history?

Philip Dray

#26. There was no United States before slavery. I am sure somebody can make some sort of argument about modern French identity and slavery and North Africa, but there simply is no American history before black people.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#27. 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.

Barbara Jordan

#28. We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.

Yvette Clarke

#29. Did the color of his skin matter? No, Lina decided, wouldn't his racial ambiguity be a strength? Wasn't this a history from which they had all emerged, every American, black and white and every shade in between?

Tara Conklin

#30. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#31. In Chicago and across the country, whites looking to achieve the American dream could rely on a legitimate credit system backed by the government. Blacks were herded into the sights of unscrupulous lenders who took them for money and for sport.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#32. The mainstreaming of African American history was a byproduct of the long black freedom struggle, the early black history movement, and the black student movement of the Black Power era.

Pero Gaglo Dagbovie

#33. Both European and American historians have done away with any conceptual limits on what in the past needs and deserves investigating. The result, among other things, has been a flood of works on gender history, black history, and ethnic history of all kinds.

Edmund Morgan

#34. Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can.

Arthur Ashe

#35. It [the Harlem Renaissance] was a time of black individualism, a time marked by a vast array of characters whose uniqueness challenged the traditional inability of white Americans to differentiate between blacks.

Clement Alexander Price

#36. The methodologies of examining hip hop are borrowed from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, communications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and other disciplines.

Michael Eric Dyson

#37. The twenty-first-century successful black woman is brilliant and tenacious and not afraid to flex her intellectual, spiritual, or financial muscles. She has accomplished, earned, and owned more than black women of any other generation in American history.

Sophia Nelson

#38. There's no doubt that many of the mainstream white institutions tend to be cosmetic and symbolic when it comes to including African-Americans, whereas we black folk tend to be much more sensitive about embracing others, and we have a long history of that.

Cornel West

#39. 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

#40. 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

#41. Their story, as the Delany sisters like to say, is not meant as "black" or "women's" history, but American history. It belongs to all of us. (From the Preface of "Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years)

Amy Hill Hearth

#42. I'm a history geek and I love American history. It's so bizarre and so problematic and I love the many conundrums that it represents. You can go down so many black holes.

Matana Roberts

#43. This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history.

Teju Cole

#44. Trayvon Martin, at the most, seems only to have been guilty of being himself.

Aberjhani

#45. 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.

Maya Angelou