Top 100 Quotes About Black History
#1. 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
#2. We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.
Yvette Clarke
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. The Republican Party's history is rich and chock full of emancipation and black history.
Rand Paul
#6. 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
#7. I don't celebrate Valentine's Day. It gets in the way of Black History Month. Cupid didn't free any slaves.
Damien Lemon
#8. 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
#9. 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
#10. 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
#11. Phillip Roth uses his Black women characters to make anti intellectual remarks about Black history month, begun by a man who reached intellectual heights that Roth will never attain.Roth is a petty bigot and his ignorant remarks about black culture expose him as a buffoon to scholars the world over.
Ishmael Reed
#12. 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
#13. The problem with relegating black history to one really short month, the shortest month, is not only are we telling the same stories over and over again - which are amazing, George Washington Carver is incredible, there's nobody like Frederick Douglass - but there are so many.
Karyn Parsons
#14. Slavery isn't Black history," I point out. "It's everyone's history." A
Jodi Picoult
#15. Oh, I'm following President Obama on Twitter. I like my black history in 140 characters or less.
Baratunde R. Thurston
#16. If you only think of me during Black History Month, I must be failing as an educator and as an astrophysicist.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#17. Black History Month is in the shortest month of the year, and the coldest-just in case we want to have a parade
Chris Rock
#18. Black History Month must be more than just a month of remembrance; it should be a tribute to our history and reminder of the work that lies in the months and years ahead.
Marty Meehan
#19. Black History Month has been extended indefinitely by The Bronzeville Press.
Harold Lee Rush
#20. If the only time you think of me as a scientist is during Black History Month, then I must not be doing my job as a scientist.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson
#21. As we celebrate Black History Month we should be grateful for the achievements they made and inspired by their legacies to continue their work.
Marty Meehan
#23. They oughtta change Black History Month to Black Progress Month and start measuring it.
Rush Limbaugh
#24. 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
#25. I did a book in 1996, an overview of black history. In that process I became more aware of a lot of the black inventors of the 19th century.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#26. I don't want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.
Morgan Freeman
#27. The violence that undergirded the country, so flagrantly on display during Black History Month, and the intimate violence of "Yeah, nigger, what's up now?" were not unrelated. And this violence was not magical, but was of a piece and by design.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#28. I'm a sponge for historical images of black people and black history on film.
Kara Walker
#29. It is my hope that as we commemorate Black History Month in the future, we will continue to celebrate the many achievements and rich culture of African-Americans.
Eliot Engel
#30. The thing about black history is that the truth is so much more complex than anything you could make up.
Henry Louis Gates
#31. 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.
#32. There was a manifesto in the late '60s/early '70s, and it basically laid out what 'black art' was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules - I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists.
Kara Walker
#33. You go to school, you study about the Germans and the French, but not about your own race. I hope the time will come when you study black history too.
Booker T. Washington
#34. They put exclusively black history in the syllabus. Is there a difference between a black history of the world and a proper history? They say children must read black novels. Does a novel have a skin colour?
Imraan Coovadia
#36. 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
#37. 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
#38. 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
#39. All business is personal ... Make your friends before you need them.
Robert Johnson
#40. 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
#41. Where history concerns mainly personalities, the drawings become either black or white according to the interests of the writer.
Isaac Asimov
#42. 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
#43. 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
#44. 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
#45. Black women all over the world should re-unite and re-examine the way history has portrayed us.
Buchi Emecheta
#46. The greatest untapped reservoir of raw material in the history of our game is the black race.
Branch Rickey
#47. After Jackie Robinson the most important black in baseball history is Reggie Jackson, I really mean that.
Reggie Jackson
#48. 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
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. 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
#52. 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
#53. 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
#54. 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
#55. 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
#56. 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
#57. I will not take 'but' for an answer. Negroes have been looking at democracy's 'but' too long.
Langston Hughes
#58. 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
#59. 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
#60. Between 1882 and 1968, more black people were lynched in MIssissippi than in any other state.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. 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
#64. 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
#66. 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
#67. 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
#68. No human being in history was all good or all bad, or all black or all white.
Anastasia Griffith
#69. 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
#70. 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
#71. 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
#72. 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
#73. Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can.
Arthur Ashe
#74. 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
#75. I'm hurting because the color of my skin makes me perfect for their target practice.
R H Sin
#76. Any ministry to black people which is not designed to effect their empowerment is designed to perpetuate their enslavement.
Albert B. Cleage Jr.
#77. 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
#78. 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
#79. If you want to get an idea across, wrap it up in a person.
Ralph Bunche
#80. Our history told of kings that smiled and kings that conquered. He was the latter.
Rachel E. Carter
#81. 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
#82. 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
#83. 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
#84. 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
#85. 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
#86. 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
#87. 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
#88. 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
#89. 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
#90. I believe black characters in fiction are still revolutionary, given our long history of erasure.
Tananarive Due
#91. 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
#92. 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
#93. 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
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. So on June 16, 1970, history was made in Newark. Ken Gibson became the first black mayor of a major Northeastern city.
Junius Williams
#97. 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
#98. 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
#99. 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.
#100. 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
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