African-American Quotes
Refusing induction into the armed forces during the Vietnam War:
This quotation illustrates the degree or irrationality that Southerners practiced in considering racial matters. Lee was stating what virtually all Southern “Gentlemen” believed. Here was a class of people who had hardly worked at day in their lives opining on the work attitudes of the class of people who did most of all the work in the South. The Southern Whites not only expected the Negro slave to do the work, but to be enthusiastic about working. And it never even occurred to Lee and most of the other whites that Negro lack of “disposition” to work was the result of the fact that they were forced to work with the benefits going to someone else. It was a character flaw in Blacks, if they were not enthusiastic and disposed to work when forced to. One of the few ways a slave could register his/her protest was to beat the system now and then and do as little work as possible. Free Blacks in the North were among the hardest and most enthusiastic working people in America—certainly moreso than the Southern white gentlemen.
_0_thumbnail_47x47.jpg "A portrait of Richard Allen, a Methodist bishop and founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Church"){kind=small}
The Free African Society was the first Negro organization in America. It was a non-denominational mutual aid society that assisted its members and fugitive slaves and new Negro migrants to the city of Philadelphia.
A Southern Republican congressman with a voting record that was against minority interest, for the first time in American, interrupted and insulted the President of the United States in the midst of an invited Presidential Address to Congress given by Barack Obama, calling him a liar. Carter, himself a Southerner, recognized the motivation.
Dr. Ambrose was the senior Black education official in the country. Note his title which was given to him by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
