QUOTES
What
we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the
world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.
For
me, education means to inspire people to live more abundantly, to learn to begin
with life as they find it and make it better.
"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."
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.
Let
us banish fear.
Negroes
who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities for development
are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination.
The
different ness 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.
The
mere imparting of information is not education. Above all things, the effort must
result in making a man think and do for himself.
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.
Those
who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration
which comes from the teaching of biography and history.
“In
the long run, there is not much discrimination against superior talent.”
“We need workers,
not leaders. Such workers will solve the problems which race leaders talk about.”
“If you can control
a man’s thinking, you don’t have to worry about his actions. If you can determine
what a man thinks you do not have worry about what he will do. If you can make
a man believe that he is inferior, you don’t have to compel him to seek an inferior
status, he will do so without being told and if you can make a man believe that
he is justly an outcast, you don’t have to order him to the back door, he will
go to the back door on his own and if there is no back door, the very nature of
the man will demand that you build one.”
The
accounts of the successful strivings of Negroes for enlightenment under most adverse
circumstances reads like beautiful romances of a people in an heroic age.
Truth
comes to us from the past, then, like gold washed down from the mountains.
