Black History Quotes

Schools don't teach American history that well, especially a lot of black American history.

The biggest surprise for me, without a doubt, was that the first black people who came to the United States weren't the 20 who arrived in Jamestown in 1619. All of us had been taught that. The first African came to Florida in 1513. And the huge shock is we know his name, Juan Garrido, and that he wasn't a slave. He was free!

I came back to Louisville after the Olympics with my shiny gold medal. Went into a luncheonette where black folks couldn't eat. Thought I'd put them on the spot. I sat down and asked for a meal. The Olympic champion wearing his gold medal. They said, "We don't serve niggers here." I said, "That's okay, I don't eat 'em." But they put me out in the street. So I went down to the river, the Ohio River, and threw my gold medal in it.

The history of black America was from slavery, oppression, civil rights, and you felt kind of isolated as an entity in our country.

Dr. Martin Luther King is not a black hero. He is an American hero.

The Republican Party's history is rich and chock full of emancipation and black history.

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

Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.

X is not my real name. But if you study history, you'll find why no Black man in the Western Hemisphere knows his real name. Some of his ancestors kidnapped our ancestors from Africa and took us into the Western Hemisphere and sold us there, and our names were stripped from us and so today we don't know who we really are. I am one of those who admit it, and so I just put X up there to keep from wearing his name.

I did this whole series on the buffalo soldiers-on black soldiers-I did another series on black cowboys, and I presented myself to the gallery system, and all these people with these massive collections didn't know there were black cowboys or black soldiers. I ended up hitting a niche I didn't know was there.

Black history is American history. You cannot tell one story without telling the other.

Phillip Roth uses his Black women characters to make anti intellectual remarks about Black history month, begun by a man who reached intellectual heights that Roth will never attain. Roth is a petty bigot and his ignorant remarks about black culture expose him as a buffoon to scholars the world over.

Her continuity - you know, if you connect Harriet Tubman, who died in 1913, to Rosa Parks, born in 1913, you get this extraordinary spectrum of the African-American experience.

Blacks have experienced a history of victimization in America, beginning obviously in slavery and then another 100 years of segregation. I grew up in segregation. I know very well what it was about and all of the difficulties it placed on black life, and how we were truly held down before the civil-rights movement.

In order for us, black and white, to disenthrall ourselves from the harshest slavemaster, racism, we must disinter our buried history.... We are all the Pilgrim, setting out on this journey.

The James Brown story is not about James Brown. It's about who's getting paid, whose interest is involved, who can squeeze the estate and black history for more.

We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.

The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.

There was a manifesto in the late '60s/early '70s, and it basically laid out what 'black art' was and that it should embrace black history and black culture. There were all these rules - I was shocked, when I found it in a book, that it even existed, that it would demarcate these artists.

Black history won't stop no bullets.

I'm the son of a Black man who was born in the segregated South.

Jesus' birthday is commercialized, so of course, Black History Month is commercialized.

... the Negro in Africa had reared mighty empires, and astonishingly advanced achievements are linked with his race in the annals of mankind.

Black History Month is fine, but we need more months of the year to celebrate all the people on this earth. After all, we're all creatures of the same God.

We’ve gone through the names—Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that’s an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black?