Carter G. Woodson

I am ready to act, if I can find brave men to help me.
Carter G. Woodson

This crusade is much more important than the anti- lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.
Carter G. Woodson

If the white man wants to hold on to it, let him do so; but the Negro, so far as he is able, should develop and carry out a program of his own.
Carter G. Woodson

The differentness of races, moreover, is no evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not possess. It is by the development of these gifts that every race must justify its right to exist.
Carter G. Woodson

Even if Negroes do successfully imitate the whites, nothing new has thereby been accomplished. You simply have a larger number of persons doing what others have been doing. The unusual gifts of the race have not thereby been developed, and an unwilling world, therefore continues to wonder that the Negro is good for.
Carter G. Woodson

Facing this undesirable result, the highly educated Negro often grows sour. He becomes too pessimistic to be a constructive force and usually develops into a chronic fault-finder or a complainant at the bar of public opinion.
Carter G. Woodson

Here we find that the Negro has failed to recover from his slavish habit of berating his own and worshipping others as perfect beings.
Carter G. Woodson

At this moment, then, the Negroes must begin to do the very thing which they have been taught that they cannot do.
Carter G. Woodson

No systematic effort toward change has been possible, for, taught the same economics, history, philosophy, literature and religion which have established the present code of morals, the Negro's mind has been brought under the control of his oppressor.
Carter G. Woodson

Above all things, the effort must result in making a man or woman think and do for himself or herself just as the Jews have done in spite of universal persecution.
Carter G. Woodson

The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people.
Carter G. Woodson

Practically all of the successful Negroes in this country are of the uneducated type or of that of Negroes who have had no formal education at all.
Carter G. Woodson

The 'educated Negroes' have the attitude of contempt toward their own people because in their own as well in their mixed schools, Negroes are taught to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin, and the Teuton and to despise the African...For example, an [white] officer of a Negro university, thinking that an additional course on the Negro should be given there, called upon a Negro Doctor of Philosophy of the faculty to offer such work. [The Negro Doctor] promptly informed the officer that he knew nothing about the Negro. He did not go to school to waste his time that way. He went to be educated in a system which dismissed the Negro as a nonentity.
Carter G. Woodson

The educational system of a country is worthless unless it [revolutionizes the social order]. Men of scholarship, and prophetic insight, must show us the right way and lead us into light which is shining brighter and brighter.
Carter G. Woodson

The mere imparting of information is not education.
Carter G. Woodson

The thought of the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.
Carter G. Woodson

Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?
Carter G. Woodson

As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst form of lynching. It kills one's aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime.
Carter G. Woodson

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.
Carter G. Woodson

In schools of theology Negroes are taught the interpretation of the Bible worked out by those who have justified segregation and winked at the economic debasement of the Negro at times almost to the point of starvation.
Carter G. Woodson

Negroes who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities for development are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination.
Carter G. Woodson

The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.
Carter G. Woodson

Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority.
Carter G. Woodson

Freedom is to come to the Negro, not as a bequest, but as a conquest.
Carter G. Woodson

Besides building self-esteem among blacks, help eliminate prejudice among whites.
Carter G. Woodson

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.
Carter G. Woodson

We have a wonderful history behind us. ... If you are unable to demonstrate to the world that you have this record, the world will say to you, 'You are not worthy to enjoy the blessings of democracy or anything else'.
Carter G. Woodson

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.
Carter G. Woodson

And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race.
Carter G. Woodson

They still have some money, and they have needs to supply. They must begin immediately to pool their earnings and organize industries to participate in supplying social and economic demands.
Carter G. Woodson

I am a radical.
Carter G. Woodson

In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them.
Carter G. Woodson

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.
Carter G. Woodson

We need workers, not leaders. Such workers will solve the problems which race leaders talk about.
Carter G. Woodson

Let us banish fear.
Carter G. Woodson

Truth comes to us from the past, then, like gold washed down from the mountains.
Carter G. Woodson

Truth must be dug up from the past and presented to the circle of scholastics in scientific form and then through stories and dramatizations that will permeate our educational system.
Carter G. Woodson

I am not afraid of being sued by white businessmen. In fact, I should welcome such a law suit.
Carter G. Woodson

In the long run, there is not much discrimination against superior talent. It constrains men to recognize it.
Carter G. Woodson

The author takes the position that the consumer pays the tax, and as such every individual of the social order should be given unlimited opportunity to make the most of himself.
Carter G. Woodson, Miseducation of the Negro