African American History Quotes

“The leaders and followers of the Harlem Renaissance were every bit as intent on using Black culture to help make the United States a more functional democracy as they were on employing Black culture to 'vindicate' Black people.”
― Aberjhani, Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

“Our past was slavery. We cannot recur to it with any sense of complacency or composure. The history of it is a record of stripes, a revelation of agony. It is written in characters of blood. Its breath is a sigh, its voice a groan, and we turn from it with a shudder. The duty of to-day is to meet the questions that confront us with intelligence and courage.”
― Frederick Douglass

“Assessing Miller's rebuttal and the 1895 convention, W.E.B. Du Bois made a sobering observation. Miller had, on some fundamental level, misunderstood the aims of the white men who sought to destroy Reconstruction. From Du Bois's perspective, the 1895 constitutional convention was not an exercise in moral reform, or an effort to purge the state of corruption. These were simply bywords embraced to cover for the restoration of a despotic white supremacy. The problem was not that South Carolina's Reconstruction-era government had been consumed by unprecedented graft. Indeed, it was the exact opposite. The very success Miller highlighted, the actual record of 'Negro government' in South Carolina, undermined white supremacy. To redeem white supremacy, that record was twisted, mocked, and caricatured into something that better resembled the prejudices of white South Carolina. 'If there was one thing that South Carolina feared more than bad Negro government,' wrote Du Bois, 'it was good Negro government.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy

“There are hundreds of political prisoners right now in America’s jails who were so taken by Malcolm [X’s} spirit that they became warriors and the powers that be understood them as warriors. They knew that a lot of these other middle-class [black] leaders were not warriors; they were professionals; they were careerists. But these warriors had callings, and they have paid an incalculable and immeasurable price in those cells.”
― Cornel West, Black Prophetic Fire

“We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.”
― FRANCES ELLEN WATKINS HARPER

“Not one thing in the world more dangerous than a white woman when she is bored.”
― Sara Collins

“Jefferson knew that slavery degraded the humanity of those who perpetuated its existence because it necessitated the subjugation of another human being; at the same time, he believed that Black people were an inferior class. This is where Jefferson's logic falls apart, historian Winthrop D. Jordan wrote in 1968. If Jefferson truly believed that Black people were inferior, then he must have "suspected that the Creator might have in fact created men unequal; and he could not say this without giving his assertion exactly the same logical force as his famous statement to the contrary.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“Paul Cuffee, born in 1759, was a free, able and resourceful Quaker businessman of African and American Indian descent. Although he was black himself, Cuffee became a ship’s captain and built a lucrative shipping empire. Becoming a prosperous merchant he had the money to carry out his various philanthropically ventures. In 1815 he also established the first racially integrated school in the United States, locating it in Westport, Massachusetts.
The following year he advocated settling freed American slaves back to the West Coast of Africa. At first he found little support from the young American government but being aware of a British colony founded in Freetown, Sierra Leone a British colony he looked for support for his venture from the British government. Although they didn’t support him financially, they did allow him to bring in the freed former slaves. As he became better known as a crusader for this purpose, free black leaders and some members of United States Congress joined him and embraced his plan to take emigrants to Sierra Leone. At the start Cuffee intended to make only one voyage per year, taking settlers and off set his expenses by bringing back nonperishable valuable cargoes such as hand crafted items and furniture quality hard woods.
In 1816, at his own expense, Captain Cuffee took thirty-eight American freed blacks, from Boston to Sierra Leone, which was still the only colony that existed for this purpose in West Africa.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, "Seawater Two...."

“In response to the demand for more black culture and history, the national bourgeoisie of the U.S.A. has adopted a technique different from that of their neo-colonialist puppets in the West Indies. Having that security which comes from the possession of capital, they feel confident in making certain concessions to black culture in their educational institutions and media of public communications. As always, they concede the lesser demand to maintain the total structure of white capitalist domination, hoping to siphon off young blacks into a preoccupation with African history and culture divorced from the raw reality of the American system as it operates on both the domestic and international fronts. That gambit must not work. Imagine the juicy contradictions — Rockefeller finances chair on African history from the profits of exploiting South African blacks and upholding apartheid! Black revolutionaries study African culture alongside of researchers into germ warfare against the Vietnamese people!

We blacks in the Americas have missed the opportunity when a more leisurely appraisal of our past might have been possible.”
― Walter Rodney, The Groundings with My Brothers

“Lilith, I call on thee. Oh great she-demon of myth, she-demon of vengeance, hear my call, heed my plea.”
― N.D. Jones, Sins of the Sister

“This process taught us to test and challenge the prevailing wisdom about the paucity of African American artifacts. What we discovered was a paucity of effort and creativity rather than a scarcity of collections. I hope that our efforts will spur other institutions to embrace community-driven collecting and commit the resources to look inside the basements and garages for material that was once deemed less important to the interpretive agenda of museums. Not every cultural organization will discover items from Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, or Marian Anderson, but every museum that makes the effort will find discover items from Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner, or Marian Anderson, but every museum, but every museum that makes the effort will find objects that document the lives, the work, the resiliency, and the dreams of their community.”
― Lonnie G. Bunch III, A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump

“I had always believed that the [Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture] should be a safe haven that helps Americans wrestle with and better understand the difficult current issues of race, justice, and equality. In essence, the museum is a bully pulpit that provides NMAAHC with the opportunity and responsibility to clarify and contextualize concerns that often divide or perplex the American public.... I think it is important for NMAAHC, for the Smithsonian, to engage in the public square in a manner that brings reason, knowledge, and contextualization to the contemporary challenges faced by America. Actions like this are not without risk to an institution that operates within a federal umbrella. Yet I believe that museums like NMAAHC have an obligation to use their expertise, their platform, to contribute to the greater good of a nation.”
― Lonnie G. Bunch III, A Fool's Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump

“Our Negro problem, therefore, is not of the Negro's making. No group in our population is less responsible for its existence. But every group is responsible for its continuance...Both races need to understand that their rights and duties are mutual and equal and their interests in the common good are identical...There is not help or healing in appraising past responsibilities or in present apportioning of praise or blame. The past is of value only as it aids in understanding the present."

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(From a 1922 Report on the 1919 Chicago Riots)”
― Wilkerson Isabel

“. . . (S)lavery could not function without the lubricant of violence. . . The whip accompanied the lives of the enslaved from the moment they entered an Atlantic slave ship to their dying days in slavery.”
― James Walvin, A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power

“You going learn. We are not the ones ask the questions, we the ones answer them. And the answer always yes.”
― Sara Collins

“That was a mistake. I should l have remembered that there are many who find an educated black more threatening than a savage one.”
― Sara Collins

“I'd belonged to Langton, you must remember, grown as if from a mango pit he'd tossed out of a window, and therefore still thought I was HIS to give... That is what I was trying to tell you, when you asked, "Why didn't you just RUN?"
"I kept forgetting... that I was no longer owned”
― Sara Collins

“I will tell you what abolishing the trade did. When a man cannot buy stock, he breeds it. Every woman at Paradise was a belly woman then! Lining up on Sundays, waiting at the front porch for their half-dollars and their maccarronis. "See Massa! Me breed good new neger for Massa. Big strong neger.”
― Sara Collins

“Why is it that every white you'll ever meet either wants to tame you or rescue you?”
― sara collins

“What no one will admit about the anti-slavers is that they've all got a slaver's appetite for misery, even if they want to do different things with it.”
― Sara Collins

“They wrote, yes. But thousands could, if someone would bother to teach them. And everything they wrote was written for whites. Petitions. Appeals. It's another of this world's laws. Blacks will write only about suffering, and only for white people, as if out purpose here is to change their mind.”
― Sara Collins

“[Thomas] Jefferson believed himself to be a benevolent slave owner, but his moral ideas came second to, and were always entangled with, his own economic interests and the interests of his family.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“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.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“I thought about how Juneteenth is a holiday that inspires so much celebration, born from circumstances imbued with so much tragedy. Enslavers in Texas, and across the South, attempted to keep Black people in bondage for months, and theoretically years, after their freedom had been granted. Juneteenth, then, is both a day to solemnly remember what this country has done to Black Americans and a day to celebrate all that Black Americans have overcome. It is a reminder that each day this country must consciously make a decision to move toward freedom for all of its citizens, and that this is something that must be done proactively; it will not happen on its own. The project of freedom, Juneteenth reminds us, is precarious, and we should regularly remind ourselves how many people who came before us never got to experience it, and how many people there are still waiting.”
― Clint Smith, How the Word Is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America

“There is no more vital right in a democracy than the right to vote. Without it, no other right is secure.”
― Lawrence Goldstone, Stolen Justice: The Struggle for African American Voting Rights

“Surveying the media landscape in 1968, who could miss the overwhelming white male dominance of ownership, management, and content creation? If television was a new driver of the national conversation, what sort of meaningful dialogue could be had without major participation by minorities?”
― Jon Else, True South: Henry Hampton and "Eyes on the Prize," the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement

“Eyes on the Prize" may be a grainy old fossil of a movie, but you can learn a lot from fossils if you understand where they sit on the layers of rock and how they go there.”
― Jon Else, True South: Henry Hampton and "Eyes on the Prize," the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement

“Black women's history is a tale of fierce determination, sass, and unyielding resilience. From Sojourner Truth's "Ain't I a Woman?" speech to Maya Angelou's poetic prowess, they've left a trail of fabulousness in their wake. With style, grace they've faced adversity head-on and emerged as queens of their own narratives. So let's raise a glass this February to the trailblazers, the game-changers, and the unsung heroes!”
― Life is Positive

“We don’t have anything to fear. I don’t know tonight whether I’ll actually get back to Ruleville! But all that they can destroy is the Fannie Lou that you meet tonight. But it’s the Fannie Lou that God hold will keep on living, day after day!”
― Fannie Lou Hamer, The Speeches of Fannie Lou Hamer: To Tell It Like It Is

“The terms of this revolution are precisely these: that we will learn to live together here or all of us will abruptly stop living.”
― James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time