Carter G. Woodson Quotes

The reality in Washington D.C. is if you live in Tenleytown versus if you live in Anacostia, you get two wildly different educational experiences. It’s the biggest social injustice imaginable. What we are allowing to happen in this day and age, we are still allowing the color of a child’s skin and the Zip code they live in to dictate their educational outcome, and therefore their life outcome. We are robbing them every single day of their futures. And everybody in this country should be infuriated by that.

I don't totally believe that all of the politicians see a problem with the gap between the scores of black children and other groups. I believe that many politicians think this has been the way it has always been, so what's the problem?

At least black people knew when they were slaves; you remain clueless.

Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.

Your white uniform as a black domestic was your ticket anywhere in town.

The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor - all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.

I have the utmost respect and 'aloha' for black people - who have already suffered so much due to racial discrimination and acts of hatred.

We must treat the disease of racism. This means we must understand the disease.

Negroes who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities for development are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination.

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled stirrings.

Blacks—across the economic and ideological spectrum—often feel astonishingly vulnerable, of accusations of disloyalty to race.

... if the United States is indeed the great melting pot, the Negro either didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.

Savage Inequalities

If you’re born in America with a black skin, you’re born in prison, and the masses of black people in America today are beginning to regard our plight or predicament in this society as one of a prison inmate.

I cannot escape the conscientious discharge of my duty towards a class of American citizens, whose only crime consists of their color.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

The Negro family, battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble. While many young Negroes are moving ahead to unprecedented levels of achievement, many more are falling further and further behind.

I am prepared to oppose a Jim Crow army till I rot in jail.

The ugly heart of the South still beats with this idea that one group of people is worth less.

Black people are pledging their fealty to the state, and yet they aren't getting the same return. This is theft. It's systemized.

Canadians would not tolerate it if they really knew there was a whole generation of aboriginal Canadians who have a chance at a better education and are being denied it.

I find it really unique that the black community, who has been oppressed and is still oppressed, can find a way to oppress themselves, and ourselves, within it.

In America, a black man has to feel like he's God just to make it a little bit when white people can just feel human. They can just be themselves, but for me, I feel we have to start instilling that back into our people. That pride. That black power. That privilege to be alive.

I was a player who was vying to do exactly what everyone else was doing, and I happened to be black.