Written Record Quotes
Johnson was the greatest boxer of his era and perhaps of all time. The not only beat the what champions in an era of Jim Crowe but he lived an ostentation life as a celebrity -- almost unheard of for a Black man at tht time. He never assumed any subervience which was expected of all Negroes at the time, He lived openly with a white woman and was jailed for a while. What is particualrly interesting about this quotation is that with all his accomplishments as the best boxer in the world, a man wh was very wealthy, that the thing he was most proud of was that he had maintained his manhood and did not cower as almost all blacks were forst to do. What he achieved ia what most Black men have striven for and still do.
This was true until the internet and the World Wide web were capable of storing and replaying audio. So today, the quotation might be updated to: "If You Do Not Write It or record it, You Never Said It."
Although the Bedouin culture was and is primarily an oral culture, in recent generations schools were introduced into society along with book learning. This proverb is of relatively late origin and reflects the Bedouin tradition of reducing all wisdom to oral proverbs—even wisdom about the relative weakness or oral communications. See {616459} for the more traditional view of the transfer of knowledge.
