Malcolm X Quotes

We are raising students in America who are, by and large, historically illiterate.

I don't know if a country (America) where the people are so ignorant of reality and of history, if you can call that a free world.

We constantly see surveys that reveal this ignorance, especially among our high school students,78 percent of whom, in a recent nationwide multiple-choice test, identified Abraham Lincoln as 'a kind of lobster.' That's right: more than three quarters of our nation's youth could not correctly identify the man who invented the telephone.

The African-American experience is one of the most important threads in the American tapestry.

When I was in South Africa, I went for dinner with some friends, and I knew more about their history than they did - it just hasn't been told.

One of the things that really bothers me is that Americans don't have any sense of history. The majority of Americans don't have any idea of where we've come from, so they naturally succumb to the kind of cliche version that Ronald Reagan represented.

I'm somewhat horrified because I don't think the young people today even know what history is. Some of them don't' even study History at school anymore or Geography and they don't know where one place is from another.

Like other Americans, U.S. journalists have often neglected the study of history; they have much remedial work to do in trying to understand who did what to whom, why and when - and who did it first.

Backward is just not a natural direction for Americans to look - historical ignorance remains a national characteristic.

Americans today don’t know history—even the smart ones who went to Ivy League schools.

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.

History education in schools is so poor that students often enter college ignorant of the past - and leave just as unenlightened.

Even getting a college degree does not guarantee a minimal knowledge of U.S. history.

I came into my teens unaware that most Americans, blacks as well as whites, were ignorant of the main facts of Negro history. And so it was the facts of other histories that I found most intriguing. I fell into a U.S. history major by chance late in my second year at Fisk University.

I had access to books, and I could read... but that more foundational, basic historical awareness, I didn't have any of that.

I love history, and I thought I knew history well, but I was shocked by how little I knew about it.

The story of the African-American people is the story of the settlement and growth of America itself, a universal tale that all people should experience.

Ah, Fist, it’s the curse of history that those who should read them, never do.

Would America have been America without her Negro people?

We are raising a generation of young Americans who are, to a very large degree, historically illiterate. It's not their faults. There's no problem about enlisting their interest in history. None. The problem is the teachers so often have no history in their background.

I realized that most white Americans knew very little about our history and our struggle, and were having difficulty understanding the basis for our agitation and our resistance and our complaints. I also discovered that while black Americans had a sense of the beauty and tragedy of the journey from the time of slavery until now, we were not rooted in the specifics. I thought one way to familiarize people with that history would be through the voices of the great folk artists.

The problem that we have is that most Americans don't even study American history, let alone Pinochet, Mussolini, Hitler, Stalin and all these guys.

He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.

Not to have knowledge of what happened before you were born is to be condemned to live as a child.

I personally feel like black people in America have contributed so much for so long, and haven't always gotten credit for it.