Quotes About African American History

#1. African American history is really American history because African Americans really helped build this country.

Don Lemon

#2. I always say African American history is the quintessential American story. It's about perseverance and resilience - something everyone can relate to.

Philip Freelon

#3. For so-called conscious rappers, it is an opportunity to rap about ways to educate others about African American history, politics and even relationships: all of which would be missed if society merely focused on the "hook" and ignored the influence.

Carlos Wallace

#4. My particular lifetime, my individual profile, represents something very basic to African-American history and culture because I was a second generation immigrant, so to speak, from the South. My grandfather was born in South Carolina - well, both grandfathers were born in the South.

John Edgar Wideman

#5. 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

#6. Let's go beyond the Trinity of African-American History. There are so many more to learn about other than Harriett Tubman, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks.

Karimah Grayson

#7. 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

#8. 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

#9. 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

#10. Beyond [Barack Obama] having made history as the first African-American president, I hope that he gets re-elected for what he does while in office, not for his skin color. I certainly believe he has the capacity.

Lenny Kravitz

#11. In the long, nonillustrious history of white people pilfering African American culture, have I just perpetrated that? I'm motivated by a love for the music and by a love of the performances, and I really hope I haven't done anything bad.

Moby

#12. One of the biggest things I understood in a program like that was that it allowed more young African American scholars to do field research in the Caribbean and in Africa than had ever happened before in the history of the country and since.

Bernice Johnson Reagon

#13. In the closing years of the nineteenth century, African-American historians began to look at their people's history from their vantage point and their point of view.

John Henrik Clarke

#14. There clearly is a serious race problem in the country. Just take a look at what's happening to African American communities. For example wealth, wealth in African American communities is almost zero. The history is striking.

Noam Chomsky

#15. History is the land-mark by which we are directed into the true course of life.

Marcus Garvey

#16. The slaves who were ourselves had known terror intimately, confused sunrise with pain, & accepted indifference as kindness.

Ntozake Shange

#17. Mayor Walmsley is using the typical Jim Crow manipulation tactics to deflect the blame and guilt. He's a classic racist politician with an ulterior motive," says Ora.

Shaune Bordere

#18. The history of African-American repression in this country rose from government-sanctioned racism. Jim Crow laws were a product of bigoted state and local governments.

Rand Paul

#19. New Jersey for me is so alive with history. It's old, dynamic, African-American, Latino.

Junot Diaz

#20. Defining myself, as opposed to being defined by others, is one of the most difficult challenges I face.

Carol Moseley Braun

#21. I don't have a problem with these Arizona laws. I have a problem with Chicano, Gay and Lesbian, Asian-American and African-American histories not being taught in American History courses.

M.G. Hardie

#22. Some people would view Jackie Robinson as a very safe African-American, a docile figure who had a tendency to try to get along with everyone, and when you look at his history, you learn that he has this fire that allows him to take this punishment but also figure out savvy ways of giving it back.

Chadwick Boseman

#23. 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

#24. I can never do justice to the great feeling of amazement and encouragement I felt when, perhaps for the first time in American history, white citizens of a Southern state banded together to come to Selma and show their indignation about the injustices against the African-Americans.

Amelia Boynton Robinson

#25. 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

#26. 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

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

Yvette Clarke

#28. I wanted my art to deal with very formal concerns and to deal with very material concerns, and to deal with antecedents and art history, which for me go very far beyond just the influence of African-American artists.

Rashid Johnson

#29. Bonhoeffer's experiences with African American community underscored an idea that was developing in his mind: the only real piety and power that he had seen in the American church seemed to be in the churches where there were a present reality and a past history of suffering.

Eric Metaxas

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

Arthur Ashe

#31. I am the first African-American chairman of any major conservation organization in history. That's a big step.

Jerome Ringo

#32. The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.

Bernie Sanders

#33. 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

#34. 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

#35. 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

#36. Sen. Joe Biden, on the day of announcing his candidacy for president of the United States, called Barack Obama the first mainstream African-American who is articulate, bright, and ... clean. I think we've seen the shortest presidential campaign in history.

Jay Leno

#37. For African-American people, I am in the business of inventing a reality that gives a different perspective - on history, on crime, on art, on love.

John Edgar Wideman

#38. My Native American heritage was not embraced by our family, and we grew up African-American, so I didn't have a lot of access or history to that line of my family.

Tamara Tunie

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

Aberjhani

#40. I have a long history in fighting for civil rights. I understand that many people in the African-American community may not understand that.

Bernie Sanders

#41. 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

#42. In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion.

Douglas A. Blackmon