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Quote by Roger Nash Baldwin

“I would say that social work began in my mind in the Unitarian Church when I was ten or twelve years old, and I started to do things that I thought would help other people.”

Quote by Roger Nash Baldwin

Author

Roger Nash Baldwin
Roger Nash Baldwin

Roger Nash Baldwin (January 21, 1884 – August 26, 1981) was an American pacifist, civil‑rights lawyer, and one of the founding figures of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Born in Brooklyn, New York, he studied law at Columbia and Harvard before turning to activism during World War I, opposing U.S. entry and helping form the American Union Against Militarism. In 1931 he co‑founded the ACLU and served as its first executive secretary, guiding the organization to defend free speech, religious liberty, and due process for dissenters, labor organizers, and minorities. Baldwin’s lifelong commitment to non‑violence and constitutional rights made him a central architect of modern American civil‑liberties advocacy, influencing later human‑rights movements worldwide. more

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“Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Do you know that there are libraries in our country that will not stock a book by a Negro writer, not even as a gift? There are towns where Negro newspapers and magazines cannot be sold except surreptitiously. There are American magazines that have never published anything by Negroes. There are film studios that have never hired a Negro writer. Censorship for us begins at the color line.”

“Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.”