Sojourner Truth Quotes

There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before.

My mother saw nothing inconsistent in her traditional desire to look after her husband and children and her radical politics. She began her civil rights work before most people had ever heard the word 'feminism,' and in those early years, she was focused on racial justice.

My father has a pragmatic mind. He marched with Dr. King in the '60s, and he's very much for women's rights.

Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambitions of our brighter minds. The way for people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away.

We got the vote, which we should've been born with, in 1920. Everything we've had to struggle for - it's ridiculous.

Feminism is rooted in racial rights and gender rights, and all of those things intersect, and to say that that's not something you can stand behind - it confuses me. I think it's a really great word.

There is certainly greatness in the '60s generation. They changed our attitudes about race in America, which was long overdue. They didn't just stand up and salute when told to go to war. Women finally began to realize a more equal place in our society.

During the 19th-century struggle for women's rights in America, many saw a competition between rights for black people and those for women.

Votes for women didn’t come until the 1920’s. Votes for Blacks didn’t effectively come until the 1960’s.

We are justified in believing that the success of this movement for equality of the sexes means more progress toward equality of the races.

The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women. It is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians.

I still remember, at the age of 12, learning that segregation had been permitted only a couple of decades before I was born and that a woman's right to vote was not even a century old. But it was great Americans who stood up, some dying for the cause, to make our country better.

[W]e need to talk over not only those things which are of vital importance to us as women, but also the things that are of especial interest to us as colored women.

Not only Negroes and Jews, but also women are part of a great revolt of which one can only approve.

It is no longer acceptable to discuss women's rights as separate from human rights.

I am glad to see that men are getting their rights, but I want women to get theirs, and while the water is stirring, I will step into the pool.

I am above eighty years old ... I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored women. I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked.

I've always considered myself a feminist, I always considered myself somebody who is a reproductive rights activist, and I've spent the past 25 years of my life speaking truth to power. And using humor to do that.

And ar'n't I a woman?

The common goal of 22 million Afro-Americans is respect as human beings, the God-given right to be a human being. Our common goal is to obtain the human rights America has been denying us. We can never get civil rights in America until our human rights are first restored. We will never be recognized as citizens there until we are first recognized as humans.

... being a feminist means that you believe in civil rights and social justice.

I’m an atheist, and I believe religion is totally against human rights and women’s rights.

In cultural history, the civil rights movement came before the women's movement.

Has he paid his dues? Is he black enough? John Lewis and I were out there marching and organizing sit-ins back in the '60s so that his children and my children would not have to do it. We would have been failures if had to do the same things we did.

The story of women's struggle for equality belongs to no single feminist nor to any one organization but to the collective efforts of all who care about human rights