History

Take a tour of history with these gripping opinions from exceptional African-Americans.

All of Western tradition, from the late bloom of the British Empire right through the early doom of Vietnam, dictates that you do something spectacular and irreversible whenever you find yourself in or whenever you impose yourself upon a wholly unfamiliar situation belonging to somebody else. Frequently it's your soul or your honor or your manhood, or democracy itself, at stake.
June Jordan

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

At no time within the last five-hundred years can one point to a single instance of the Negro as a race of haters.
Marcus Garvey

Be as proud of your race today as our fathers were in days of yore. We have beautiful history, and we shall create another in the future that will astonish the world.
Marcus Garvey, The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey

Before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, we were here. Before the pen of Jefferson etched across the pages of history the majestic words of the Declaration of Independence, we were here. If the inexpressible cruelties of slavery could not stop us, the opposition we now face will surely fail.
Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from a Birmingham Jail

For Africa to me... is more than a glamorous fact. It is a historical truth. No man can know where he is going unless he knows exactly where he has been and exactly how he arrived at his present place.
Maya Angelou

From seeds of his body blossomed the flower that liberated a people and touched the soul of a nation.
Jesse Jackson

History could pass for a scarlet text, its jot and title graven red in human blood.
Eldridge Cleaver

History is a people's memory, and without a memory, man is demoted to the lower animals.
Malcolm X

History is the land-mark by which we are directed into the true course of life.
Marcus Garvey

History teaches us no race, no people, no nation has ever been freed through cowardice, through cringing, through bowing and scraping, but all that has been achieved to the glory of mankind, to the glory and honour of races and nations was through the manly determination and effort of those who lead and those who are led.
Marcus Garvey

History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people, but the appalling silence of the good people.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.
Maya Angelou

I have crossed over on the backs of Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Fannie Lou Hamer, and Madam C. J. Walker. Because of them I can now live the dream. I am the seed of the free, and I know it. I intend to bear great fruit.
Oprah Winfrey

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

One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. We must not remember that Daniel Webster got drunk but only that he was a splendid constitutional lawyer. We must forget that George Washington was a slave owner . . . and simply remember the things we regard as creditable and inspiring. The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect man and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.
W.E.B. Dubois

One of the things that has to be faced is the process of waiting to change the system, how much we have got to do to find out who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.
Ella Baker

The history of a movement, the history of a nation, the history of a race is the guide-post of that movement's destiny, that nation's destiny, that race's destiny.
Marcus Garvey

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 are not makers of history. We are made by history.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

We have a beautiful history, and we shall create another in the future that will astonish the world.
Marcus Garvey

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

Whereas our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of the wilds of America, we their descendants feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil.
Richard Allen