Top 100 Quotes About Black History
#1. 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
#2. Even though sugar was very expensive, people consumed it till their teeth turned black, and if their teeth didn't turn black naturally, they blackened them artificially to show how wealthy and marvelously self-indulgent they were.
Bill Bryson
#3. I grew up here, and it's always been a very diverse community. So for people to come out and say that there's some long-standing anger or there's a history of racial tension is absolutely ridiculous. There's not a black-white divide in Ferguson.
James Knowles III
#4. All business is personal ... Make your friends before you need them.
Robert Johnson
#5. 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
#6. Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or white according to the interests of the writer.
Isaac Asimov
#7. No, there is plenty wrong with Negroes. They have no society. They're robots, automatons. No minds of their own. I hate to say that about us, but it's the truth. They are a black body with a white brain.
Malcolm X
#8. I look around. You'd have to be out of your fucking mind to write, as Marcus did, that Black History Month is a ploy to lever more entitlement money out of Congress, but the ho-hum nonresponse of the white crowd reading this bit of transparent insanity is, to me, even weirder.
Matt Taibbi
#9. 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
#10. I've been reading about Crazy Horse and Custer for a long, long time, and I thought that if I was going to write a story that took place in the Black Hills, I should find a way to include this history in it.
Will Hobbs
#11. Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.
Buchi Emecheta
#12. The greatest untapped reservoir of raw material in the history of our game is the black race.
Branch Rickey
#13. After Jackie Robinson the most important black in baseball history is Reggie Jackson, I really mean that.
Reggie Jackson
#14. And this should not surprise us. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting to which, likely to the end of our days, we must invariably return.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#15. Islamic history is written in two types of ink. Black for the ink of the scholars and red for the blood of the martyrs!
Me
#16. First black president ever, and to be living while it happened - that's a good part of history. That's probably the biggest person I admire right now.
Meek Mill
#17. Glenn Beck is offended! Glenn Beck thinks playing the Nazi card is going too far. Glenn Beck. this is a guy who uses more Swastika props and video of the Nuremberg rallies than the History Channel.
Lewis Black
#18. We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.
Yvette Clarke
#19. I wanted to write a novel that would make others feel the history: the pain and fear that black people have had to live through in order to endure.
Octavia E. Butler
#20. Kids in North Lawndale need not be confused about their prospects: Cook County's Juvenile Temporary Detention Center sits directly adjacent to the neighborhood.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#21. Somehow, I realized I could write books about black characters who reflected my own experiences or otherworldly experiences - not just stories of history, poverty and oppression.
Tananarive Due
#22. 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
#23. If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves. We should, therefore, protest openly everything ... that smacks of discrimination or slander.
Mary McLeod Bethune
#24. I will not take 'but' for an answer. Negroes have been looking at democracy's 'but' too long.
Langston Hughes
#25. Black folk, a lot of us lived as victims in a certain part of our history. And we had to really erase that tape. We're not victims. We are citizens.
Dorothy Cotton
#26. Demond's family history wasn't so different from my own, did that mean we were living the same story over and over again, down through the generations? That the young and Black had always been dying, until all that was left were children and the few old, as in war?
Jesmyn Ward
#27. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#28. 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
#29. As Jim Lawrence, a black labor activist at a GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, describes it, during the 1960s 'the union gave foremen a blank check to mistreat blacks and keep them out of the high-rate machine jobs and the skilled trades.'
David T. Hardy
#30. At its core, black theology is predicated on the assertion that God has a unique relationship with African Americans. God is not a passive bystander in human history but rather an active participant in the struggles of oppressed and dispossessed people.
Melissa V. Harris-Perry
#31. 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
#32. Even God had a Welsh name : He spoke to him in the old language; He was to have a peculiar care For the Welsh people. History showed us He was too big to be nailed to the wall Of a stone chapel, yet still we crammed him Between the boards of a black book .
R.S. Thomas
#34. 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
#35. The boy who had scolded her was Dirk Eberwein, the first non-Genestella in the history of the Le Wolfe Black Institute to reach the rank of student council president. There
Yuu Miyazaki
#36. No human being in history was all good or all bad, or all black or all white.
Anastasia Griffith
#37. The best of humanity's recorded history is a creative balance between horrors endured and victories achieved, and so it was during the Harlem Renaissance.
Aberjhani
#38. Latinos outnumber Black people now. I'm not too happy about it. Because it's only a matter of time before we lose our month. Soon as they figure it out, they're going to have Latino History Month. All we're going to have is Cinco de Negro.
Alonzo Bodden
#39. Nixon's full term was one of the most successful in U.S. history, which is why he was re-elected by the largest plurality in the country's history.
Conrad Black
#40. 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
#41. Knocking on doors wasn't working. We had to try something else. Remember the kids whose natural curiosity brought them into our little office on the corner? We set up a Freedom School that was fashioned after the SNCC Freedom Schools in Mississippi and other places.
Junius Williams
#42. Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can.
Arthur Ashe
#43. 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
#44. I'm hurting because the color of my skin makes me perfect for their target practice.
R H Sin
#45. Any ministry to black people which is not designed to effect their empowerment is designed to perpetuate their enslavement.
Albert B. Cleage Jr.
#46. Back then, Black churches were a small piece of peace. Church was a world where, even with its imperfections, the offer of equality and common humanity was the sustenance needed to make it through the rest of the week in a society that deemed them less than human.
Janelle Gray
#47. Hip hop music is important precisely because it sheds light on contemporary politics, history, and race. At its best, hip hop gives voice to marginal black youth we are not used to hearing from on such topics.
Michael Eric Dyson
#48. If you want to get an idea across, wrap it up in a person.
Ralph Bunche
#49. Our history told of kings that smiled and kings that conquered. He was the latter.
Rachel E. Carter
#50. But today when people talk about the history of Hopkins's relationship with the black community, the story many of them hold up as the worst offense is that of Henrietta Lacks - a black woman whose body, they say, was exploited by white scientists.
Rebecca Skloot
#51. The history of progress is written in the blood of men and women who have dared to espouse an unpopular cause, as, for instance, the black man's right to his body, or woman's right to her soul.
Emma Goldman
#52. The Republican Party's history is rich and chock full of emancipation and black history.
Rand Paul
#53. In Europe, populism is sort of a dirty word, but we have this wonderful history of populism in America, including the abolitionist populists and the white and black populists working together in the nineteenth century.
Zephyr Teachout
#54. But George Lucas is carrying about Black actors, about Black men, about Black history, which really incorporates and tells all of history. You can't take one race out without eliminating every other race if you're going to tell the story of the human race.
Terrence Howard
#55. 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
#56. Black people don't hijack planes, alright? Now I'll be the first to admit, we steal a lot of stuff, but we do not hijack planes. In fact, in the history of aviation, a black person has never even attempted to hijack a plane. Do you want to know why? Because you can't sell an airplane.
Alonzo Bodden
#57. 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
#58. 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
#59. I don't celebrate Valentine's Day. It gets in the way of Black History Month. Cupid didn't free any slaves.
Damien Lemon
#60. 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
#61. I have a dream, and a plan, to combine the commercial possibilities of Valentine's Day with the substance and meaning of black history month. I call it: Blackentine's Day.
Mo Rocca
#62. In economic life and history more generally, just about everything of consequence comes from black swans; ordinary events have paltry effects in the long term.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb
#63. I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.
Tananarive Due
#64. The teachings of Elijah Muhammad on how black people have been brainwashed.How they've been taught to love white and hate black, how we've been robbed of our names in slavery.We were robbed of our culture, we were robbed of our true history. So it left us a walking dead man.
Muhammad Ali
#65. 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
#66. There was an aura about King that was unforgettable. I seem him now in my mind's eye: collected, peaceful, calm. He was in his element and totally in command of himself and the situation.
Junius Williams
#67. If you think about it, I made history. Not only was I the first black British woman to be nominated for an Oscar, I was the first black British person.
Marianne Jean-Baptiste
#68. His vital signs were taken, an electrocardiogram ... which revealed occasional ventricular premature contractions. An intern took his history ... and then he was promptly ... simply ... forgotten to death.
Paddy Chayefsky
#69. So on June 16, 1970, history was made in Newark. Ken Gibson became the first black mayor of a major Northeastern city.
Junius Williams
#70. What's happening is that Asian and Latino and other groups without that history are more likely to end up in either black churches or white churches and then make them multiracial churches. I talk about that in the US we have two cultures.
Michael Emerson
#71. A conquering force sustained the old folks and now centers us. Forming a collective of comeback saints, let us rally behind them and move forward. We're called to a new awakening and application of what we've learned from those who've looked over Jordan.
Deborah L. Parker
#72. The problem with hatred and violence is that they intensity the fears of the white majority, and leave them less ashamed of their prejudices toward Negroes.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#73. 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
#74. I think slavery was an awful, awful period in our history, but when I look at what's become of black culture since emancipation, I think you have to admit, maybe the Confederacy was on to something
Zach Braff
#75. This being Black History Month, I would like to ask people to celebrate the similarities and not focus on the differences between people of color and not of color.
Lynn Swann
#76. I believe in nonviolence as a way of life, as a way of living.
John Lewis
#77. I want to make it clear that the black race did not come to the United States culturally empty-handed. The role and importance of ethnic history is in how well it teaches a people to use their own talents, take pride in their own history and love their own memories.
John Henrik Clarke
#78. The plunder of black life was drilled into this country in its infancy and reinforced across its history, so that plunder has become an heirloom, an intelligence, a sentience, a default setting
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#80. I could depend a lot on my shaking, though I never shimmied vulgarly and only to express myself.
Ethel Waters
#81. 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
#82. I find it difficult [to believe] that ... Christians accuse [Black Muslims] of teaching racial supremacy or ... hatred, because their own history and ... teachings are filled with it.
Malcolm X
#83. Perhaps future generations, the beautiful ones unborn, would wonder how we survived it all. What would we say? Or, more probably, what would history say for us? It would not speak truth. Not whole truth. It could not.
Daniel Black
#84. Why would you create a movie for black people if you don't understand the history and perspective of the people you are doing it for? You need historical perspective to make sound decisions.
Tim Reid
#85. Historical exclusivity often has a way of turning into present and institutionalized tragedy. Whose story gets told matters.
Aurin Squire
#86. Our goal was not freedom. Freedom was the necessary prerequisite to get to equality.
Jesse Jackson
#87. I never really had to put much thought into my race, and neither did anybody else. I knew I was black. I knew there was a history that accompanied my skin color, and my parents taught me to be proud of it. End of story.
Issa Rae
#88. To misbehave us to denounce the social norms that limit individuals based on who they are. That to make history is to upset patriarchy, a system that is intent on controlling and marginalising others.
Malebo Sephodi
#89. From the 1930s through the 1960s, black people across the country were largely cut out of the legitimate home-mortgage market through means both legal and extralegal. Chicago whites employed every measure, from 'restrictive covenants' to bombings, to keep their neighborhoods segregated.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#90. The Christian is a [person] of joy ... A gloomy Christian is a contradiction of terms, and nothing in all religious history has done Christianity more harm than its connection with black clothes and long faces.
William Barclay
#91. I figure this current era of history is the one with the best chance of quality of life for a black, female, disabled, middle-aged, queer person who's most comfortable not fitting in. The odds still aren't great, mind you. But I'll take my chances with the 21st century.
Nalo Hopkinson
#92. Human history's greatest crime was the traffic in black flesh when the devil white man went into Africa and murdered and kidnapped to bring to the West in chains, in slave ships, millions of black men, women, and children, who were worked and beaten and tortured as slaves.
Malcolm X
#93. I was listening to a lot of Norwegian black metal and death metal. There's a great history to Norwegian black metal. That music is very dark and violent, but it's also beautiful.
Brie Larson
#94. Life was not always so peaceful and rewarding at NAPA (the office). Sometime during 1968, I cam back to the office and found the plate glass window shattered. I asked Ab what happened, and he strangely knew nothing.
Junius Williams
#95. Most history is a record of the triumphs, disasters, and follies of top people. The black hole in it is the way of life of mute, inglorious men and women who make no nuisance of themselves in the world.
Philip Howard, 20th Earl Of Arundel
#96. It's an incredible education [for the movie J. Edgar Hoover] . It was like I did a college course on J. Edgar Hoover but not knowing and understanding the history and reading the books, but understanding what motivated this man was the most fascinating part of the research.
Dustin Lance Black
#97. Wherever you go in the history of America, there have been Black people making contributions, but their contributions have been obscured, lost, buried.
Henry Louis Gates
#98. Never forget that we were enslaved in this country longer than we have been free. Never forget that for 250 years black people were born into chains-whole generations followed by more generations who knew nothing but chains.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#99. Black History Month should be celebrated everyday. It's a month that's kind of sad to me, because I am reminded of the struggles that people before us had to go through for us to be able to live comfortably today.
Tamara James
#100. This fantasy about the disposability of black life is a constant in American history.
Teju Cole
