Unity and Equality

The Blacks' struggle, even in a nation pledged to these ideals, has been long and intractable. Read their thoughts here.

A spirit of harmony can only survive if each of us remembers, when bitterness and self-interest seem to prevail, that we share a common destiny.
Barbara Jordan

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

How do we create a harmonious society out of so many kinds of people? The key is tolerance -- the one value that is indispensable in creating community.
Barbara Jordan, All Together Now

It is not our differences that divide us. It is our inability to recognize, accept, and celebrate those differences.
Audre Lorde

Present day statesmen are making the biggest blunder of the age if they believe that there can be any peace without equity and justice to all mankind. Any attempt at disarmament when half the world oppresses the other half is but a farce, because the oppressed will make their oppressors get armed sooner or later.
Marcus Garvey

Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one's soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.
Josephine Baker

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.
Audre Lorde

We have flown the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes, but have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth like brothers.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
Martin Luther King, Jr.

We've got to show that blacks and whites are treated equally in the army. Otherwise, what's the point of waging war on Hitler?
Josephine Baker

You learn about equality in history and civics, but you find out life is not really like that.
Arthur Ashe

[W]e can make clear what peaceful coexistence means. It means living in peace and friendship with another kind of society--a fully integrated society where the people control their destinies, where poverty and illiteracy have been eliminated, and where new kinds of human beings develop in the framework of a new level of social living.
Paul Robeson, Paul Robeson Speaks