Quotes & Sayings About African American Education

I don't have a problem with these Arizona laws. I have a problem with Chicano, Gay and Lesbian, Asian-American and African-American histories not being taught in American History courses. — M.G. Hardie

There are not many of us African American Sister Presidents, and those of us who are in this field do not have an easy time of it. Why the story goes that one Black woman college president died and went to hell, and it was two weeks before she realized that she wasn't still on the job. — Johnnetta B. Cole

To handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching. It kills one's aspirations and dooms him to vagabondage and crime. — Carter G. Woodson

The abolition of slavery, apart from preservation of the Union, was the most important result of our Civil War. But the transition was badly handled. Slaves were simply declared free and then left to their own devises. Southern Negroes, powerless, continued to be underprivileged in education, medical care, job opportunities and political status. — William Silverman

Not one thought entered my head that did not seem disloyal. I was ashamed, seeing their pride close up, as if for the first time, at how little I had accomplished, how much I had failed to do at St. Paul's. Somewhere in the last two years I had forgotten my mission. What had I done, I kept thinking, that was worthy of their faith? How had I helped my race? How had I prepared myself for a meaningful future? ... They were right: only a handful of us got this break. I wanted to shout at them that I had squandered it. Now that it's all over, hey, I'm not your girl! I couldn't do it. — Lorene Cary

Let's go beyond the Trinity of African-American History. There are so many more to learn about other than Harriett Tubman, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. — Karimah Grayson

The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies. — Ishmael Reed

I had not expected the gentle, tentative surge of gratitude I began to feel...for St. Paul's School, the spring, and the early morning. I needed the morning light and the warbling birds. I needed to find a way to live in this place for a moment and get the good of it. I had tried to hold myself apart, and the aloneness proved more terrible than what I had tried to escape. — Lorene Cary

From The Corner To The Corner Office - It's Not Just A Book, It's A Lifestyle! — James A. Barlow

The South believed an educated Negro to be a dangerous Negro. And the South was not wholly wrong; for education among all kinds of men always has had, and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. Nevertheless, men strive to know. — W.E.B. Du Bois

The times today are too dangerous for the young and the smart to be not bothered. Know the truth. Remember, "We can deny the truth. But, we can't avoid it." We have been there; we have all been there. Ask a female friend who is fighting for a better pay scale, ask the father of an immigrant who is nervous about the future of his daughter, ask a gay friend who is fighting for the right to marry, ask an African-American friend who wants her younger brother to be unafraid and proud, ask a homeless worker in Bangladesh whose house just got swept by rising sea levels, ask a young child in Beijing who breathes an air polluted by fossil fuels, ask a child labor in India who works ten hours and twelve hours to get two square meals a day. And, when you ask, you will know. You will know why we need to take it personally. — Sharad Vivek Sagar

There is nothing inherently evil in the process of making money,
and the notion is illogical, but that is one of the underlying tenets
in our present education system. We are taught from an early age
that making money is hard and that those who make lots of money
are morally suspect. American culture studies programs at some of
the nation's leading universities have even gone so far as to teach the
absurd and illogical notion that the rich became rich because they
enjoy privilege earned on the backs of African slaves. Minority
millionaires like entrepreneur Herman Cain, Earl Graves, Sr., and
Reginald F. Lewis prove the utter nonsense of this notion, yet this
is the illogical Progressive philosophy that has permeated our education
system. — Ziad K. Abdelnour

The author meets an African-American who observes that his fellows who begin with aspirations to a good education, solid career, and the raising of a family slowly lose that incentive. Even those who have a college education, he observes, need to take menial jobs and begin to look for excitement in less productive places. — John Howard Griffin

And everybody was happy that uncle lee was able to get that scholarship even though you wondered when you could do quadratic equations in your head why you had a basketball scholarship but you always knew that you had to take what they were giving since that was all you were going to get but you never fooled yourself about either the taking or the giving or the needing or the having you just sort of said to yourself I'll have to see what is being offered — Nikki Giovanni