We Communists are like seeds and the people are like the soil. Wherever we go, we must unite with the people, take root and blossom among them.
The hope that poverty and ignorance may gradually be extinguished, derives indeed much support from the steady progress of the working classes during the nineteenth century.
This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift; it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.
I play to lift a city, and raise a banner.
Education, doing homework, is the way to lift up girls. Around the world, where girls are educated, the economy and the standard of living rise.
The colored population voluntarily sustain several churches, schools, and mutual assistance and improvement societies, and there are evidently persons among them of no inconsiderable cultivation of mind.
He had visited Washington DC.
Since it is one of the great attributes of our species to be susceptible of improvement and capable of experiencing the most beneficial changes, for this reason what are vulgarly called 'venerable establishments' will often range themselves in opposition to the best interests of the community.
There's a full-court press to put down an uprising around Ferguson, but no preparation for lifting up the people there.
We rise by lifting others.
The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.
Schools were not just places to learn. They were epicenters of social revolution.
He was referring to the public schools of the 1960’s and the school desegregation movement in the South.
The truth is that all civic and social change is friction. Politics is friction. The only way you can bend the arc of history is to create that kind of friction, which is something that makes most people incredibly uncomfortable but which, for whatever reason, because of my upbringing or because of my genetics, is something that doesn't bug me.
The progress of society depends on nothing more than the exposure of time-honored abuses.
Men in masses do not forget the main gains of their civilization, and that, in spite of deteriorations, their tendency is upward.
If we cannot by reason, by influence, by example, by strenuous effort, and by personal sacrifice, mend the bad places of civilization, we certainly cannot do it by force.
And what always struck me about that war period was how even Churchill had to talk socialism to keep up people's morale.
But no one can praise Roosevelt for doing this and then insist that he restored our traditional political and economic systems to their former vitality.
I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change. Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. It had to serve as the center of the community’s political, economic and social as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities
Booker Washington was branded an accommodationist by many of the people who criticized him.
The regeneration of society is the regeneration of society by individual education.
One of the key things for me about Madame Walker's life is that she really does represent this first generation out of slavery when black people were reinventing themselves, and as a woman who was the first child in her family born free, she was trying to figure out a way, and she moved from Delta, Louisiana.
Britain's great postwar meritocratic experiment was broad-based, but it was in politics that the change was most dramatic.
You can't find your way to social reform through the forces that made social reform necessary.
The educated classes are possessed by the idea that in the social domain anything can be accomplished if only one applies enough force and is sufficiently resolute.
If their were more Franklin operations it could help the cause much more than right wing activity.