Quotes – Mahalia Jackson – Thurgood Marshall

Mahalia Jackson
Black promoters oppressed me before whiter promoters ever got a hold of me. Don’t talk skin to
me.
Darker skin made me famous; I’d lived so far inside the colored people’s world that I didn’t have
to pay attention every day to the way white people in this country act toward a person with a darker skin

Reggie Jackson
I don’t mind being beaten but I hate to lose.
Please God let me hit one. I’ll tell everybody you did it.
Fans don’t boo nobodies.

Harriet Ann Jacobs
You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have
the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another. You
never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares and eluding the power of a hated tyrant;
you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps. And trembled within the hearing of his voice.
There are wrongs which even the grave does not bury.
I was sold at last! A human being sold in a free city of New York! The bill of sale is on the
record, and future generations will learn from it that women were articles of traffic in New York,
late in the nineteenth century of the Christian religion.
Slaveholders have been cunning to enact that “ the child shall follow the condition of the
mother”, not of the Father; thus taking care that licentiousness shall not interfere with avarice.
Slavery is terrible for men: but is far more terrible for women…. If God has bestowed beauty
upon her, it will prove her greatest curse. That which commands admiration in white women
only hastens the degradation of the female slave.

Charles R. Johnson
Our experience as black men and women completely outstrips our perception- black life is
ambiguous, and a kaleidoscope of meanings, rich, multi-sided…. We have frozen our vision in
figures that characterize, at best, the complexity of our lives and leave the real artistic chore of
interpretation unfinished.
Black fiction will become one of increasing intellectual and artistic generosity, one that enable us
as a people, as a culture, to move from narrow complaint to broad celebration.

Earvin “Magic” Johnson
If people around you aren’t going anywhere, if dreams are no bigger than hanging out on the
corner, or if they’re dragging you down, get rid of them. Negative people can sap your energy
so fast, and they can take your dreams from you ,too.
All kids need a little help, a little hope, and somebody who believes in them.
(On winning the heavyweight crown) To me it was not a racial triumph, but there were those
who were to take this view of the situation, and almost immediately a great hue and cry went up
because a colored man was holding the championship.
Don’t let your dreams be dreams.

James Weldon Johnson
Harlem is a place where life wakes up at night.
Though the black man fights passively, he nevertheless fights; and his passive resistance is
more effective at present than active resistance could possibly be. He bears the fury of the
storm as does the willow tree.
The influence which the Negro has exercised on the art of dancing in this country has been
almost absolute.
Young man, young man, your arm’s too short to box with God.
I was amazed and amused watching white people dancing to a Negro band in Harlem cabaret;
attempting to throw off the crusts and layers of inhibitions laid on by sophisticated civilizations…
trying to work their way back to the jungle which was the original Garden of Eden; in a word
doing their best to pass for colored.

John H. Johnson
Never has so many white Americans paid black Americans that sincere form of flattery-imitation.
Every day I run scared. That’s the only way I can stay ahead.
James Earl Jones.
Once you begin to explain or excuse all events on racial grounds, you begin to indulge in the
perilous mythology of race. It is dangerous to say, “The white man is the cause of my problems”,
or “the black man is the cause of my problems”. Substitute any color- the danger is implicit.
Oner of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can’t utter.

Barbara Jordan
In Congress, one chips away, one does not make bold strokes. After six years I have wearied of
the little chips that I could put on a woodpile.
Most Negroes have a little Black Militancy swimming inside of them and most white people have
a little Ku Klux Klan swimming around in them. If we’d be honest with each other, we would
discover that we are al victims of the racism that is historically part of this country.
I somehow felt for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out
of the Constitution by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation, and court
decision. I have finally been included in “We, the people.”

June Jordan
Behold my heart of darkness as it quickens now, with rage.
We do not deride the fears of prospering white America. A nation of violence and private
property has every reason to dread the violated and the deprived.
As a black woman feminist, I must look about me, with trembling, and with shocked anger, at the
endless waste, the endless suffocation of me sisters…. How is my own lifework serving to end
tyrannies, these corrosions of sacred possibility.
We have been flexible, ingenious , and innovative or we have perished. And we have not
perished.

Jackie Joyner-Kersee
It’s better to look ahead and prepare than to look back and regret.
Age is no barrier. It’s a limitation you put on your mind.
I don’t think being an athlete is unfeminine. I think of it as a kind of grace.

Florence R. Kennedy
If men could become pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.
Don’t agonize, organize.
The biggest sin is sitting on your ass.

John Oliver Killens
The Negro was invented in America.
The white man’s juju is powerful stuff, but it cannot wish the Negro into invisibility.
Western man wrote “his” history as if it were the history of the whole human race.
Harlem is the largest plantation in the country.

Jamaica Kincaid
Black people don’t like unhappy endings- perhaps we have too many.
On their way to freedom, some people find riches, some people find death.
Already, her mouth was turned down permanently at the corners, as if to show she had been
born realizing that nobody else behaved properly, and as if also she had been born knowing that
everything in life was a disappointment and her face was all set to meet it.

B.B. King
I guess the earliest sound of blues that I can remember was in the fields while people would be
pickin’ cotton or choppin’ or somethin’.when I sing and play now I can hear those same sounds
that I used to hear then as a kid,
Maybe our forefathers couldn’t keep their language together when they were taken from Africa.
But this, the blues, was a language we invented to let people know we had something to say.

Martin Luther King
We can never be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New
York has mothing for which to vote.
A man who won’t die for something is not fit to live.
A man cannot ride on your back unless it’s bent.
To expect God to do everything while we do nothing is not faith but superstition.
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
Truth pressed to earth will rise again….no lie can live forever.

Nella Larson
If a man calls me nigger it’s his fault the first time, but mine if he has the opportunity to do it
again.
These people yapped loudly of race, of race consciousness, of race pride, and yet suppressed
its most delightful manifestations, love of color, joy of rhythmic motion, naïve, spontaneous
laughter, harmony, radiance, and simplicity, all the essentials of spiritual beauty in the race they
marked for destruction.

Lead Belly
If a white woman says something, it must be so, and she can say something about a colored
person. If it’s a thousand colored men, they kill all of ‘em for that one white woman. If she ain’t
telling the truth, it don’t make any difference. Why? Cause it’s Jim Crow, and I know it’s so’
‘cause the Scottsboro boys can tell about it.
I’m just doing stuff. Letting the people know what America folk music is, unwritten music, made
up by the people.

Spike Lee
We’ve got to change this backward thinking around where ignorance is championed over
intelligence. Young black kids being ridiculed by their peers for getting A’s and speaking proper
English; that’s criminal.
Do the Right Thing.
People who have faults are more interesting than people who are perfect.

Sugar Ray Leonard
A fighter never knows when it’s the last bell.
Boxing is not something I truly enjoyed. Like lots of things in life. When you put the gloves on,
it’s better to give than receive.

Julius Lester
If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and
eaten alive.
Every black woman in America lives her life somewhere along a wide curve of ancient and
unexpressed anger.
I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not have a voice because they are
so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that
silence would save us, but it won’t.
We cannot afford to do our enemies’ work by destroying each other.

John R. Lewis
The next time we match , we won’t march on Washington, but we will march through the south,
through the Heart of Dixie, the way Sherman did. We will make the action of the past few months
look petty. And I say to you, “WAKE UP AMERICA!
We may not have chosen the time, but the time has chosen us.

Alain Locke
Harlem is the precious fruit in the Garden of Eden, the big apple.
Our poets have not stopped speaking for the Negro- they speak as Negroes.
We must never forget that dance is the cradle of Negro music.
The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem. The Younger Generation comes,
bringing its gifts. They are the first gifts of the Negro renaissance. Youth speaks, and the voice
of the new Negro is heard.
The position of the Negro in American culture is indeed a paradox. It almost passes the
understanding how and why a group of people can be socially despised, yet at the same time
artistically esteemed and culturally influential, can be both an oppressed minority and a
dominant cultural force.

Audre Lord
Divide and conquer, in our world, must become define and empower.
I write for those women who do not speak, for those who do not haver a voice because they are
so terrified, because we are taught to respect fear more than ourselves. We’ve been taught that
silence will save us, but it won’t.
If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crushed into other people’s fantasies for me and
eaten alive.

Joe Louis
You can run but you can’t hide.
Everything costs a lot of money when you haven’t got any.
(On being a native of the South) Nobody called me nigger until I got to Detroit.

Joseph E. Lowery
America has abandoned the strong woman of spirituality and is shacking up with the harlot of
materialism.
Rosa Parks was known as the queen mother of the civil rights movement. She sat down so that
her people could stand up.
When the government, by public policy, kept you out, the government has a responsibility, by
public policy, to bring you in. And it needs to be just as intentional about including you as it was
by excluding you.

Moms Mabley
If you always do what you always did, you will always get what you always got.

How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?

Paule Marshall
Once a great wrong has been done, it never dies. People speak the words of peace, but their
hearts do not forgive. Generations perform ceremonies of reconciliation but there is no end.

Thurgood Marshall
I am appalled by the ethical bankruptcy of those who pleach “ a right to life”, that means under
present social policies, a bare existence in utter misery for many poor women and their children.
(Brown vs Board of Education) probably did more than anything else to awaken the Negro from
his apathy.
My dad told me way back that you can’t use race. For example, there’s no difference between a
white snake and a black snake. They’ll both bite.