Jacqueline Woodson Quotes

Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It's that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated.

African American history is really American history because African Americans really helped build this country.

I think young people don't really know that much about the Civil Rights Movement and about the history of African Americans in this country. It's not taught enough in school.

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

We examine and highlight the history of the African descendants in America, and know that each and every one of us has come this far because of our faith in this country.

History looks very different from a black point of view. The heroes are different, and the eras get different names. The Progressive Era is no longer the Progressive Era, because it's the era in which more black people are lynched than in any other period in American history.

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.

One of the biggest things I understood in a program like that was that it allowed more young African American scholars to do field research in the Caribbean and in Africa than had ever happened before in the history of the country and since.

I marched back then - I was in a civil-rights musical, Fly Blackbird, and we met Martin Luther King.

Black history is American history.

The history of American women is all about leaving home - crossing oceans and continents, or getting jobs and living on their own.

I'm the descendant of enslaved black people in this country. You could've been born in 1820 if you were black and looked back to your ancestors and saw nothing but slaves all the way back to 1619. Look forward another 50 or 60 years and saw nothing but slaves.

In the disposition of these unfortunate people, there are two rational objects to be distinctly kept in view. First. The establishment of a colony on the coast of Africa, which may introduce among the aborigines the arts of cultivated life, and the blessings of civilization and science. By doing this, we may make to them some retribution for the long course of injuries we have been committing on their population.

The history of the black man did not begin with slavery.

Negro President

We are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North.

Nobody really loves America more than black Americans, because black Americans loved America even when America didn’t love us back

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

What really sets Jesse Helms apart is that he is the last prominent unabashed white racist politician in this country -- a title that one hopes will now be permanently retired.... What is unique about Helms -- and from my viewpoint, unforgivable -- is his willingness to pick at the scab of the great wound of American history, the legacy of slavery and segregation, and to inflame racial resentment against African Americans.

As they wrote Jim Crowe into law, purveyors of sectional reconciliation largely erased the campaign for black equality—and often black people themselves—from the history books.

It is not just Negroes but all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

There are not enough Yankees between Cape Cod and Hell to prevent Southern people from doing as they please with the Negro.

Let Southern oppressors tremble — let their secret abettors tremble — let their Northern apologists tremble — let all the enemies of the persecuted blacks tremble.

In approaching this problem [school desegregation], we cannot turn the clock back...

There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal rights and privileges in the United States.