Martin Delany Quotes

During the next half-century or more, my race must continue passing through the severe American crucible. We are to be tested in our patience, our forbearance, our perseverance, our power to endure wrong, to withstand temptations, to economize, to acquire and use skill; our ability to compete, to succeed in commerce, to disregard the superficial for the real, the appearance for the substance, to be great and yet small, learned and yet simple, high and yet the servant of all. This, this is the passport to all that is best in the life of our Republic, and the Negro must possess it, or be de barred.

If we do not teach our sons, no one else is going to do it, because they don’t care.

Don't terrorize. Organize. Don't burn. Give kids a chance to learn ... The real answer to race problems in this country is education. Not burning and killing. Be ready. Be qualified. Own something. Be somebody. That's Black Power.

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.

When you become a parent, or a teacher, you turn into a manager of this whole system. You become the person controlling the bubble of innocence around a child, regulating it.

I need a teacher quite as much as Helen. I know the education of this child will be the distinguishing event of my life, if I have the brains and perseverance to accomplish it.

There's no question that a great teacher can make a huge difference in a student's achievement, and we need to recruit, train and reward more such teachers. But here's what some new studies are also showing: We need better parents. Parents more focused on their children's education can also make a huge difference in a student's achievement.

Children are amazing, and while I go to places like Princeton and Harvard and Yale, and of course I teach at Columbia, NYU, and that's nice and I love students, but the most fun of all are the real little ones, the young ones.

Parents can shape a child, but a great teacher can, too.

The relation between parents and children is essentially based on teaching.

It is the malady of our age that the young are so busy teaching us that they have no time left to learn.

My dear, the duty that devolved wholly on you in my absence of guiding and expanding the minds of our dear children is a laborious one and a responsible one.

I have an equal amount of patience as my grade-school children, which is not great.

A father is a person who's around, participating in a child's life. He's a teacher who helps to guide and shape and mold that young person, someone for that young person to talk to, to share with, their ups and their downs, their fears and their concerns.

I think through education, belief in God, and good engineering, our children become a lot better at what they're doing than we did, and that starts with the very first sign of life on the face of this earth.

For all its ups and downs and challenges, I love writing. We only grow through adversity, so I welcome the difficulties, knowing bumps in the road are my greatest teachers.

In the hands of the Negro teacher rests the destiny of the race.

It is lamentable, that many of our children go to school, from four until they are eight or ten, and sometimes fifteen years of age, and leave school knowing but a little more about the grammar of their language than a horse does about handling a musket--and not a few of them are really so ignorant, that they are unable to answer a person correctly, general questions in geography, and to hear them read, would only be to disgust a man who has a taste for reading; which, to do well as trifling as it may appear to some, (to the ignorant in particular) is a great part of learning. Some few of them, may make out to scribble tolerably well, over a half sheet of paper, which I believe has hitherto been a powerful obstacle in our way, to keep us from acquiring knowledge. An ignorant father, who knows no more than what nature has taught him, together with what little he acquires by the senses of hearing and seeing, finding his son able to write a neat hand, sets it down for granted that he has as good learning as any body; the young, ignorant gump, hearing his father or mother, who perhaps may be ten times more ignorant, in point of literature, than himself, extolling his learning, struts about, in the full assurance, that his attainments in literature are sufficient to take him through the world, when, in fact, he has scarcely any learning at all!!!!

I would stand at the cradle of every colored boy and girl in the land and bid them to awake from their slumber, put on their clothes and shoes, prepare their toilet, eat an early breakfast, throw their satchel of books on their shoulders and hasten to the school house and remain until they have secured a parchment of graduation

Shall we encourage our young men to be farmers and mechanics? Yes, a thousand times yes, encourage them to become producers as well as consumers, to be owners and tillers of the soil as well as cultivators and rentors; teach them that it is just as honorable to be an honest farmer as to be a lawyer, teacher or a preacher, and the royal road to success and happiness is built on honest labor, either of muscle or brain.

No, not at liberty; because it was considered a stain on the family, but the young men did it; there was a good deal of it.  They often kept one girl steady and sometimes two on different places; men who had wives did it too sometimes; if they could get it on their own place it was easier but they would go wherever they could get it.

I will begin a new program to get private enterprise into the ghetto and the ghetto into private enterprise. I call it “Black Capitalism.” More black ownership of business and land and homes can be the multiplier of pride that will end our racial strife.

Fifty dollars per month will support one teacher. We ought to begin this school year with at least one hundred teachers, supported by regular monthly contributions, according to the ability of the people of every community in the States above named. Shall this result be secured? We appeal to the clergy of every denomination; we appeal to every church; we appeal to every community. Let committees be appointed to secure monthly subscribers. Let alert clubs be organized among the children. Let sociables be held, and made profitable for this object. Volunteer to do these things. Do not wait for an agent to come along, as there is no time to lose. We urge you to do this by the highest considerations of patriotism, humanity and religion.

The price of the liberation of the whites is the liberation of the Blacks.

We have young men with shoes which light up when they walk and a brain that seems dead when they talk.