Quotes: Medgar Evers – Jesse Jackson

Medgar Evers
Our only hope is to control the vote.
I’m looking to be shot every time I step out of my car… If I die, it will be for a good cause. I’ve been fighting for
America just as much as soldiers in Vietnam.
You can kill a man, but you can’t kill an idea.

Myrlie Evers-Williams
The Till case touched off a worldwide clamor and cast the glare of a world spotlight on Mississippi racism. For it was
proof that even youth was no defense against the ultimate terror, that lynching was still the final means by which white
supremacy would be upheld, that whites could still murder Negroes with impunity… that no Negro life was really safe.
We both knew he was going to die. Medgar did not want to be a martyr. But if he had to die to get us this far, he was
willing to do it.

Jessie Redmon Fauset
All the possibilities of all black men are needed to weld together the black men of the world against the day when
black and white meet to do battle. God grant that when that day comes, we shall be so powerful that the enemy will
say,” But behold! These men are our brothers.”

George Foreman
We’re all blind men on the corner- we got to learn to trust people, or we’ll never cross the street.
Everybody wants to be somebody. The thing that you have to do is give them confidence that they can. You have to
give a kid a dream.

James Forten
It seems almost incredible that the advocates of liberty should conceive of the idea of selling a fellow creature to
slavery.

Timothy Thomas Fortune
It is bad enough to be denied equal political rights, but to be murdered by mobs- denied the protection of life and limb
and property- the thing is not to be endured without protest, and if violence must be met with violence, let it be met.
We do not counsel violence, we counsel manly retaliation.
When the Negro steals from society what society steals from him under the specious cover of individual law is hung
upon the nearest oak tree, and the white villains who shoots the Negro without provocation is not so much as
arrested- when society tolerates such an abnormal state of things, what will the harvest be?

Redd Foxx
There is no doubt that black street language has spilled over to every walk of life in society today, thus making
American language (you’ll pardon the expression) colorful.

Aretha Franklin
I believe the black revolution certainly forced me and the majority of black people to begin taking a second look at
themselves, it wasn’t that we were all ashamed of ourselves, we merely start appreciating our “natural selves” …
falling in love with ourselves just as we are.

John Hopes Franklin
The South’s historians served the cause of Southern nationalism with more lasting effect than did the armies…
Southerners must win with the pen what they have failed to win with the sword.
Racial segregation, discrimination and degradation are no unanticipated accidents in the country’s history. They stem
logically and directly from the legacy that the founding fathers bestowed upon contemporary America…When the
colonists emerged victorious from the war with England, they had both their independence and their slaves.

E. Franklin Frazier
The Negro does not want love. He wants justice… I believe it would be better for the Negro soul to be seared with
hate than dwarfed by self-abasement.
The closer the Negro got to the Ballot box, the more he looked like a rapist.

Joe Frazier
Comment made to Ali after the ‘Thrilla in Manilla’. You one bad nigger. We both bad niggers. We don’t do no crawlin’.

Henry Highland Garnet
Slavery had stretched its dark wings of death over the land, the Church stood silently by- the priests prophesied
falsely, and the people loved to have it so. Its throne is established and now reins triumphant.

Marcus Garvey
Africa for Africans, at home and abroad.
The only protection against injustice in man is power- physical financial and scientific.
Radicalism is a label that is always applied to the people who are endeavoring to get freedom.
We have outgrown slavery, but our minds are still enslaved to the thinking of the master race. Now take the kinks out
of your mind, instead of out of your hair.
Black men are not going to cringe before anyone but God.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
My grandfather was colored, my father was a Negro, and I am black.
In literacy lay freedom for the black slave…. No group of slaves anywhere, at any other period of history, has left
such a large suppository of tes5timony about the horror of becoming the legal property of another human being.
( rap lyrics in trial- obscenity or art) The very large question of obscenity and the First Amendment cannot even be
addressed until those who would answer them become literate in the vernacular traditions of African Americans.
That separateness led to inequality was the great theme of the civil rights era. That equality leads to separateness is
the unavoidable conclusion of the aftermath.

Althea Gibson
In the field of sports you are more or less accepted for what you do rather than what you are.

Bob Gibson
Why do I have to be an example for your kid? YOU be an example for your own kid.

Paula Giddings
Throughout the social history of black women, children are more important than marriage in determining the
woman’s domestic role.
Black women have been perceived as token women in black texts and token blacks in feminist ones.

Whoopi Goldberg
I don’t have pet peeves. I have whole kennels of irritation.

Dick Gregory
You know why Madison Avenue advertising has never done well in Harlem. We’re the only ones who know what it
means to be brand X.
If it wasn’t for Abe Lincoln, because such people are just naïve enough to go out and do what the founding fathers
said oppressed people should do. I’d still be on the open market.
It’s dangerous for white Americans to insist that basic American documents be read by the black poor, and
oppressed, because such people are just naïve enough to go out and do what the founding fathers said oppressed
people should do.
Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in the civil rights bills. Not to be
confused with human rights, which are dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by
right of their birth.

Francis J. Grimke
The white people in this country seem to be greatly concerned as to whether humanity or the savage is to rule in
other lands but utterly indifferent as to which rules in his.
Slavery is gone, but the spirit of it still remains.
Black [people know what white people mean when they say law and order.

Fannie Lou Hamer
If this is the great society, I’d hate to see a bad one.
Nobody’d free until everyone is free.
I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Only God has kept the negro sane.

Lani Guinier
In a racially divider society, majority rule may become majority tyranny.

Alex Haley
When you clench your fist, nobody can put anything in your hand.

Arsenio Hall
White people have always let us entertain them, but we’ve never had real control, any real power….. It’s a new day
you know, and it’s time for us to stop shooting the ball and start owning the court.

Fred Hampton
We understand that politics is nothing but war without bloodshed; and war is nothing but politics with bloodshed.
What this country has done to non-violent leaders like Martin Luther King- I think that objectivity says there’s going to
have to be an armed struggle.

Lionel Hampton
In some towns where we couldn’t get a hotel room or a room in a decent restaurant- even if we could pay for it- the
people treated us like kings once we got up on the stage.
With Benny Goodman touring with two black musicians was a pioneering effort. Nobody has ever travelled with an
integrated band before, and even though Teddy Wilson and I were only part of the Benny Goodman Quartet, that was
still too much for some white people.
If you were a black entertainer of any kind- musician, singer, comedian- being a headliner at the Apollo was your
proudest achievement.

W.C. Handy
Modern blues is the expression of the emotional life of the race.
The blues is where we came from and what we experience. The blues came from nothingness, from want, from
desire.

Lorraine Hansberry
Seems like God don’t see fit to give the black man nothing but dreams- but He did give us children to make them
dreams seem worthwhile.
The foremost enemy of the Negro intelligentsia has been isolation.
My grandmother was born in slavery and had memories of it and they didn’t sound anything like Gone With the Wind.

France Ellen Watkins Harper
Make me a grave where’re you will, in a lonely plain, or a lofty hill; make it amongst earth’s humblest graves, but not
in a land where men are slaves.
Could slavery exist long if it did not sit on a commercial throne.
Mother stood, with streaming eyes, and saw their dearest children sold, unheeded rose their bitter cries while tyrants
battered them for gold.
For she is a mother -her child is a slave- and she’ll give him his freedom, or find him a grave.

Dorothy Height
We are not a problem people; we are people with problems. We have historic strengths; we have survived because of
family.
When you’re a black woman, you seldom do just what you want to do; you always do what you have to do.

Jimi Hendrix
Knowledge speaks but wisdom listens.
I wish they had electric guitars in the cotton fields back in the good old days. A whole lot of things would’ve been
straightened out.
You have to give people something to dream on.

Anita Hill
(on Clarence Thomas) Here is a person who is in charge of protecting rights of women and other groups in the
workplace and he is using his position of power for personal gain…. And he did it in a very ugly and intimidating way.
I think…. As African American women, we are always trained to value our community even at the expense of
ourselves.
I am really proud to be part in whatever way of women becoming active in the political scene. I think it was the first
time that people came to terms with the reality of what it meant to have a Senate made up of ninety-eight men and
two women.
The invocation of cultural excuses for gender subordination and abuse is not only a distortion or community mores, it
is the manipulative excuse for illegal behavior.

Chester Himes
Realism and absurdity are so similar in the lives of American blacks one cannot tell the difference.
The American black is a new race of man; the only new race of man to come into being in modern times.
Martyrs are needed to create incidents. Incidents are needed to create revolutions. Revolutions are needed to create
progress.

Eric Holder, Jr.
In racial terms the country that existed before the civil rights struggle is almost unrecognizable to us today. Separate
public facilities, separate entrances, poll taxes, legal discrimination, forced labor, in essence an American apartheid,
all were part of an America that the movement destroyed.
The civil rights movement made America, if not perfect, better. The other major social movements of the later half of the twentieth
century- feminism, the nations treatment of other minority groups, even the anti-war effort, were all tied in some way to the spirit that
was set free by the quest for African American equality.

Billie Holiday
When you’re poor, you grow up fast.
You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on
a plantation.

Bell Hooks
I feel that part of my mission as an artist- this is what binds me culturally to an Ice Cube and even Snoop Doggy Dog-is
understanding the beauty and esthetic complexity of the vernacular.
Black women resisted white supremist culture by making homes where all back people could
strive to be subjects not objects, where we could be affirmed in our minds and hearts despite
poverty, hardship and deprivation, where we could restore to ourselves the dignity denied to us
by the outside world.

Benjamin L. Hooks
We’ve come a long way but it’s like nibbling at the edge of darkness.
No longer can we provide polite, explicable reasons why black America cannot do more for
itself. I am calling for a moratorium on excuses. I challenge black America today -all of us- to set
aside our alibis.

Lena Horn
It’s not the load that breaks you down. It’s the way you carry it.
Over the years, I have not learned to love white people any more, or less…. I just happen to feel
more in my own skin with black people.
If patrons do not object to a negro using the elevator or taking a shower or entertaining visitors
in a suite, how could they object to her staying overnight? The contortion of logic which
segregation forces on people would alone make it worthwhile to abandon.

Langston Hughes
We Negro writers, just be being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives… Censorship for
us begins at the color line.
This the mountain standing in the way of any true Negro art in America- this urge to whiteness,
the desire to pour racial individuality into the mold of American standardization, and to be as
little Negro and as much American as possible.
Humor is laughing at what you haven’t got when you ought to have it.
Many of our institutions apparently are not trying to make men and women of their students at
all. They are doing their best to produce spineless Uncle Toms, uninformed, and full of mental
and moral evasions.

Zora Neale Hurston
I have the map of Dixie on my tongue.
I have been in Sorrows kitchen and licked out all the pots.
Nothing had been done in Negro folklore when the greatest cultural wealth of the continent is
disappearing without the world realizing it had ever been.
There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like
leaves in a dry season rotting around the feet; ; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of
underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.
Belief in magic is older than writing.

Jesse Jackson
The only justification for looking down on somebody is to pick them up.
The only protection against genocide is to remain necessary.
Your children need your presence more than your presents.
The reason Joe Louis will always be respected in the black community is that at a time when
other blacks couldn’t even talk back to white people, Joe louis was beating them up, knocking
them down and making them bleed.
Mahalia Jackson
Black promoters oppressed me b