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Black History Quotes

Browse 406 quotes about Black History.

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Black History Quotes

“George Floyd’s death may have compelled you to post a black image on your social-media accounts but what it should really have done is made you question yourself and find within you those dark places where intolerance might be hiding for who among us can stand tall and proclaim that they have never been prejudiced towards a certain ethnicity, gender, colour or faith?”

RacismPrejudiceAfrican AmericanBigotryBlack Lives MatterBlack HistoryHate CrimeGender InequalityAysha TaryamGeorge Floyd
Author:Aysha Taryam
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“Come close, be my buddy, then after a while call me nigga - it won't affect our friendship one bit. But out of the blue if you walk up to me as a complete stranger and call me that, then you only deepen the wounds caused by white oppressors throughout human history.”

Black Lives MatterBlack HistorySystemic RacismBlack History MonthRacial ProfilingBlack WritersNegroNiggaBlack Writer
Book:Şehit Sevda Society: Even in Death I Shall Live
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“Michael is an excellent storyteller and has done a wonderful job depicting Luther, and the other black characters in this book. He has done his homework and depicts many historical facts about Nicodemus in a most enlightening and creative way. It has been a pleasure working with someone who has made a concerted effort to get things right. Angela Bates Nicodemus Descendant/Historian Executive Director The Nicodemus Historical Society and Museum”

Black HistoryChristian FictionHistoricalfictionRailroadFamilysaga
Book:The Founding
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“Rosa Parks drew solace & sustenance from the long history of Black resistance before her time, placing her action & the Montgomery bus boycott in the continuum of Black protest. Her speech notes during the boycott read: 'Reading histories of others--Crispus Attucks through all wars--Richard Allen--Dr. Adam Clayton Powell Sr. & Jr. Women Phyllis Wheatley--Sojourner Truth--Harriet Tubman, Mary McLeod Bethune. For Parks, the ability to keep going, to know that the struggle for justice was possible amidst all the setbacks they encountered, was partly possible through reading & referencing the long Black struggle before her.”

InspirationReadingHistoryResistanceBlack HistoryOrganizingMontgomery Bus BoycottRosa Parks
Book:A More Beautiful and Terrible History: The Uses and Misuses of Civil Rights History
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“I watched these young people read to the audience parts of history that placed our country in context. I felt, in that moment, envious of them. Had I known when I was younger what some of these students were sharing, I felt as if I would have been liberated from a social and emotional paralysis that for so long I could not name--a paralysis that had arisen from never knowing enough of my own history to effectively identify the lies I was being told by others: lies about what slavery was and what it did to people; lies about what came after our supposed emancipation; lies about why our country looks the way it does today. I had grown up in a world that never tired of telling me and other Black children like me all of the things that were wrong with us, all of the things we needed to do better. But not enough people spoke about the reason so many Black children grow up in communities saturated with poverty and violence. Not enough people spoke about how these realities were the result of decisions made by people in power and had existed for generations before us.”

HistoryRacismSlaveryAfrican AmericansBlacksBlack HistoryAfrican American HistoryInstitutional Racism
Book:How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America
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“I once two beautiful children playing together. One was a fair white child; the other was her slave, and also her sister. When I saw them embracing each other, and heard their joyous laughter, I turned sadly away from the lovely sight. I foresaw the inevitable blight that would follow on the little slave's heart. I knew how soon her laughter would be changed to sighs. The fair child grew up to be a still fairer woman. From childhood to womanhood her pathway was blooming with flowers, and overarched by a sunny sky. Scarcely one day of her life had been clouded when the sun rose on her happy bridal morning. How had those years dealt with her slave sister, the little playmate of her childhood? She, also, was very beautiful; but the flowers and sunshine of love were not for her. She drank the cup of sin, and shame, and misery, whereof her persecuted race are compelled to drink. In view of these things, why are ye silent, ye free men and women of the north? Why do your tongues falter in maintenance of the right? Would that I had more ability! But my heart is so full, and my pen is so weak! There are noble men and women who plead for us, striving to help those who cannot help themselves. God bless them! God give them strength and courage to go on! God bless those, every where, who are laboring to advance the cause of humanity!”

SlaveryAmerican HistoryBlack HistoryUs HistoryWhite SilenceWhite History
Book:Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl
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“All I want to do is reunite my family. Free them from bond-age. But each time I do, another family is left in pieces. But my brothers would've been sold away if I hadn't come. Forever lost like our sisters. But I've never gone on a mission without the good Lord's consent. This is where I'm supposed to be. It hurts, yes, it does, but the Lord has shown me the way. And it led me back here to my brothers.”

Black HistorySlavery QuotesHistorical FantasySlavery In AmericaNd JonesUnderground RailroadHarriet Tubman
Book:Harriet's Escape: Harriet Tubman Reimagined
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“When you come down to the ground of humanity from your pedestal of intellect, then you realize that though white Americans received independence from British occupation on July 4th, 1776, it meant nothing as to the fate of the Black Americans, for they still continued to suffer as slaves officially until the declaration of the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st 1863, and somewhat unofficially till Juneteenth, that is, June 19th, 1866. I say somewhat unofficially because, it ought to be clear to anybody with half a brain by now that, slavery didn’t actually end either with Emancipation Proclamation or on Juneteenth, it morphed into racism.”

RacismSlaveryAmerican HistoryBlack HistoryEmancipationAmericanSystemic RacismEmancipation ProclamationJuly 4thJuneteenth
Book:Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society
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“I do not believe guilt is inherited, but responsibility is, and there is nobody alive today whose existence has not been shaped by colonialist, racist forces. That is a legacy we all live with, and we should all deal with the consequences. If you have benefitted, then soaking yourself in remorse and guilt does not help anyone. What you can do, though, is ask constantly how you have felt those benefits. At whose expense were they gained?”

RacismPrivilegeColonialismBlack Lives MatterBlack HistoryWhite PrivilegeRace IssuesWhite Guilt
Book:The Whole Picture: The Colonial Story of the Art in Our Museums... and Why We Need to Talk About It
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“The newspaper encouraged displaced entrepreneurs to open businesses in South Tulsa and continue smashing color barriers. But it also spoke to a larger argument about how the definition of black success had changed from building up your own community in the era of Jim Crow to "getting out" to chase bigger opportunities in the formerly all-white world.”

American HistoryBlack HistoryTulsa Race Riots
Book:Built from the Fire: The Epic Story of Tulsa's Greenwood District, America's Black Wall Street
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“It was important to name this house, but not the way "Sweet Home" or other plantations were named. There would be no adjectives suggesting coziness or grandeur or the laying claim to an instant, aristocratic past. Only numbers here to identify the house while simultaneously separating it from a street or city—marking its difference from the houses of other blacks in the neighborhood; allowing it a hint of the superiority, the pride, former slaves would take in having an address of their own. Yet a house that has, literally, a personality—which we call "haunted" when that personality is blatant.”

HouseHistoryRacismSlaveryAmerican HistoryGhostsBlack HistoryBlack Women QuotesHauntedPlantation
Book:Beloved
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“White supremacy is not a human right, it's a human rights violation, and by allowing a school to keep black history out of their curriculum, a government only perpetuates white supremacy, hence it perpetuates a human rights violation.”

SlaveryAmerican HistoryAfrican AmericansWhite SupremacyBlack HistoryHuman Rights ViolationBlack History MonthWhite SupremacistNeo Nazi
Book:Hometown Human: To Live for Soil and Society
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“It's easy to blame the patriarchy, to rightfully point at the men who rape and hold them accountable. What's harder is to notice the women who sometimes passively direct rapists toward their victims by contributing to the hypersexualization of women of color under the guise of empowerment... Feminist white women who think "sexy Pocahontas" is an empowering look instead of lingering fetishization of the rape of a child. The same imagery they claim to find sexually empowering is rooted in the myth of white women's purity and every other woman's sexual availability.”

FeminismBlack WomenBlack HistorySexualization Of Women
Book:Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot
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“Maybe that ain't the way it is for those who kill themselves. I think it ain't about wantin' to die but the bone-deep misery of not bein' able to live peacefully. Safely. Of dreamin' and prayin' for a better life but wakin' up to the same ole pain. Livin' is hard, that's for sure. But I think choosin' to die might be harder.”

SlaveryBlack HistoryHistorical FantasyNd JonesUnderground RailroadHarriet Tubman
Book:Harriet's Escape: Harriet Tubman Reimagined
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“The racial template which got placed over ethnic conflict in Detroit and other industrial cities of the North would obscure the real dynamics of the struggle, which was ethnic and religious rather than racial. Black in-migrants, as a result, were thrown into direct competition, not with the WASP elite which was orchestrating events, but rather the ethnics — specifically the Poles and to a lesser extent, the Italians — who lived in the neighborhoods immediately adjacent to the black ghettoes that were now filled to the bursting point with people hoping to benefit from the new employment opportunities the war economy provided. This led to some tragic misunderstandings, as blacks possessing their own nativist prejudices started accusing Poles of racism. The Poles who had been born in Europe were generally oblivious to racial concerns. Their children, the Poles who had been born in America, thought that the adoption of racial attitudes was part of the Americanization process. Poles in general wanted to know why they were being singled out as responsible for a situation which antedated their arrival in this country by hundreds of years, and blacks, facing Poles in direct competition for jobs and housing, wanted to know why “too many blacks had been fired to make jobs for other racial groups, some of whom can hardly speak our language and owe no allegiance to our flag.”

Black HistoryPolish American
Book:The Slaughter of Cities: Urban Renewal as Ethnic Cleansing
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“Ain't Your Nigger (Sonnet to The Whites) Yes I am colored, But I ain't your nigger. I am your way to oneness, I am the humanitarian trigger. I am the trigger for revolution, Whenever there is oppression. I am the trigger for reason, Whenever there is dogmatization. I am the trigger for ascension, Whenever there is assumption. I am the trigger for assimilation, Whenever there is discrimination. On our shackled shoulders America was built. Yet how come we are still hated to the hilt!”

SlaveryWhite SupremacyBlack Lives MatterBlack HistoryCivil Rights MovementSystemic RacismSocial Justice PoetryBlack Lives Matter PoemBlack Lives Matter ProtestsBlm Quotes
Book:Bulldozer on Duty
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“Every few months, white people trot out a new title in a series called Cops Keep Killing People. Each new release has the latest tragic scene on the cover. It sure seems to be the same book recycled over and over, but please don't form a judgment until you read all five hundred pages. Maybe this time the story will end differently and the cops will be the hero!”

MurderPoliceBlack Lives MatterBlack HistoryPolice BrutalitySystemic RacismPolice StateRacial DiscriminationRacial ProfilingRacial Injustice
Book:How Not to Get Shot: And Other Advice From White People
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“In 1822, the American Colonization Society established a new colony on the West Coast of Africa that in 1847 became the independent nation of Liberia. By 1867, the American Colonization Society had sent more than 13,000 former slaves to this new country. In the 1830s, the society was harshly attacked by abolitionists, who tried to discredit colonization as a scheme perpetrated by the slaveholder’s to rid themselves of any responsibility regarding the freeing of their former slaves. Some years later, after the Civil War, when many blacks actually wanted to go to the new country of Liberia, the money needed to send them back had dried up. During the latter part of the 19th century the American Colonization Society stopped transporting former slaves to West Africa and used its money on educational and missionary efforts thereby promoting its religious agenda instead.”

American HistoryBlack HistoryLiberian HistoryAmerican Colonization Society
Author:Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater Two...."
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“Active in the antislavery effort, helping enslaved persons, including Frederick Douglass, find safety in the North, the AME Zion Church also counted Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman as members. These abolitionists were believers who framed their powerful arguments for freedom and equality in the language of scripture and an uncorrupted Christianity.”

Black HistoryBlack Churches
Book:The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song
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“America's attention had turned to race relations during that winter of 1954-55, largely driven by the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that the nation's public schools would eventually have to be racially integrated. Crispus Attucks students were studying black history without being fully aware that their basketball team was making it.”

BasketballIntegrationSupreme CourtBlack HistoryRace RelationsIntegratedUs Supreme CourtCrispus Attucks
Book:Unbeatable: How Crispus Attucks Basketball Broke Racial Barriers and Jolted the World
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“Mothers of black boys survive by pushing fear down so it doesn't overflow, overwhelm our senses, paralyze us, and derail our ability to love, nurture and protect our black boys.”

MotherhoodCivil RightsBlack Lives MatterBlack HistoryRace RelationsBlack Women QuotesBlack EmpowermentBlack Men QuotesJanet AutherineBlack Mental Health
Book:The Heart and Soul of Black Women: Poems of Love, Struggle and Resilience
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“Too few of us from the Black Power generation and the movements to take power in cities through the election of black elected officials have told our story. Hence there is very little understanding of the agenda for change we outlined for black people and America in the 1960s and early 1970s. We wanted self-determination, and end to racism, and economic security. It is an agenda that was never fulfilled, and hence the title of my book, Unfinished Agenda.”

Civil RightsBlack HistoryUrban Politics
Book:Unfinished Agenda: Urban Politics in the Era of Black Power
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