Quotes & Sayings About Black Education

My boy, you are by blood, by appearance, by education, and by tastes a white man. Now, why do you want to throw your life away amidst the poverty and ignorance, in the hopeless struggle, of the black people of the United States? — James Weldon Johnson

Martin Luther King was a misguided leader. He worked to be recognized as the leader of black America when what black America needs isn't a leader, it is education. — Jim Brown

Yet, if I were to adhere to my mom's advice, I would have had to drop out of school years ago (since a lot of folks in our inequitable education system refuse to love us), quit engaging public health offices (because I walked in as a human in need of medical services and walked out as a patient whose subjective world was mad invisible by research lingo: "MSM," otherwise known as "men who have sex with men'), sleep in my bed all damn day (knowing it is more likely that I would be stopped by police when walking to the store in Camden or Bed-Stuy while rocking a fitted cap and carrying books than my white male neighbors would be while walking around in ski masks in the middle of summer and dropping a dime bag on the ground in front of a walking police and his dog)... — Kiese Laymon

Governments would rather spend their money on another bomber than education, and why do we fear black men when every bit of suffering in our lives has a Caucasian face attached to it? — Jeremy Clarkson

My education and that of my Black associates were quite different from the education of our white schoolmates. In the classroom we all learned past participles, but in the streets and in our homes the Blacks learned to drop s's from plurals and suffixes from past-tense verbs. We were alert to the gap separating the written word from the colloquial. We learned to slide out of one language and into another without being conscious of the effort. At school, in a given situation, we might respond with "That's not unusual." But in the street, meeting the same situation, we easily said, "It be's like that sometimes. — Maya Angelou

This is one of the consequences of a superior education, you see. In this independent, hundred-per-cent-empowered and fully and totally indigenous blacker-than-black country, a superior education is one that the whites would value, and as whites do not value local languages at the altar of what the whites deem supreme. So it was in colonial times, and so it remains, more than thirty years later. — Petina Gappah

And public transportation applied economic pressure. Freedom Riders - African Americans and whites - took bus trips throughout the South to test federal laws that banned segregation in interstate transportation. Black students had enrolled in segregated schools such as Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the University of Alabama. Picketing, protest marches, and demonstrations made headlines. Civil rights workers carried out programs for voter education and registration. The goal was — Christopher Paul Curtis

We were arguing about what was good to deal with making education fairer, diverse and more American. We were not arguing about where black scientists get a good education. — Chris Hayes

I certainly wasn't seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me, asking questions. One was, "What's your alma mater?" I told him, "Books. — Alex Haley

That year, and every year, it seemed, we began by studying the Revolutionary War. We were taken in school buses on field trips to visit Plymouth Rock, and to walk the Freedom Trail, and to climb to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument. We made dioramas out of colored construction paper depicting George Washington crossing the choppy waters of the Delaware River, and we made puppets of King George wearing white tights and a black bow in his hair. During tests we were given blank maps of the thirteen colonies, and asked to fill in names, dates, capitals. I could do it with my eyes closed. — Jhumpa Lahiri

You take a poor black child. Give him a good education, tell him he's somebody, that God didn't create junk when he created him, and that black child will create his own affirmative action. — J. C. Watts

Progress for black Americans depends on good schools because education is the last great equalizer. — Alphonso Jackson

I was blessed to get an education available to few black women in Africa at that time. Every woman should be able to get an education so she can serve others. — Julia Mavimbela

Today, a similar debate rages in black communities about the underlying causes of mass incarceration. While some argue that it is attributable primarily to racial bias and discrimination, others maintain that it is due to poor education, unraveling morals, and a lack of thrift and perseverance among the urban poor. Just as former slaves were viewed (even among some African Americans) as unworthy of full citizenship due to their lack of education and good morals, today similar arguments can be heard from black people across the political spectrum who believe that reform efforts should be focused on moral uplift and education for ghetto dwellers, rather than challenging the system of mass incarceration itself. — Michelle Alexander

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

They don't deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white ... , they only study the effects of environment on human nature. You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and leisure time, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don't spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man's conditioning. — John Howard Griffin

We [Black people] have always used our creativity to battle and we're not the only ones. Black Americans are certainly leaders in that simply because we were denied education and dealt with enforced illiteracy. But people seem to always forget that literacy is not the only way of learning things or conveying knowledge. — Nikki Giovanni

My filmmaking education consisted of finding out what filmmakers I liked were watching, then seeing those films. I learned the technical stuff from books and magazines, and with the new technology you can watch entire movies accompanied by audio commentary from the director. You can learn more from John Sturges' audio track on the 'Bad Day at Black Rock' laserdisc than you can in 20 years of film school. Film school is a complete con, because the information is there if you want it. — Paul Thomas Anderson

During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed. — Jonathan Kozol

You are what you do. If you do boring, stupid monotonous work, chances are you'll end up boring, stupid and monotonous. Work is a much better explanation for the creeping cretinization all around us than even such significant moronizing mechanisms as television and education. — Bob Black

Every single progressive education fad of the past thirty years has hurt poor black children. — Shelby Steele

I am not a conservative but I have spoken out for years against the staggering amount of blind hatred directed at black conservatives by liberals. Liberals are shockingly quick to demean and dismiss brilliant black people like Rice, Carson, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, U.S. Senator Tim Scott (R-SC), Professor Walter E. Williams and economist Thomas Sowell because they don't fit into the role they have carved out for a black person in America. Black Americans must be obedient liberals on all things or risk being called a race traitor or an Uncle Tom. — Juan Williams

The struggle being waged today, where there is any struggle being waged at all, is closer to the one that was addressed in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court accepted segregated institutions for black people, stipulating only that they must be equal to those open to white people. The dual society, at least in public education, seems in general to be unquestioned. — Jonathan Kozol

But before a computer became an inanimate object, and before Mission Control landed in Houston; before Sputnik changed the course of history, and before the NACA became NASA; before the Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka established that separate was in fact not equal, and before the poetry of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech rang out over the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Langley's West Computers were helping America dominate aeronautics, space research, and computer technology, carving out a place for themselves as female mathematicians who were also black, black mathematicians who were also female. — Margot Lee Shetterly

[May] the olive of peace and brotherhood be embraced by the white man and the black, and their children, approached in feeling and education, gradually blend into one their blood and their hue. — Frances Wright

The crisis in higher education is not only the risk of indoctrination through the vagaries of pluralism, tolerance, and diversity but also the fact that "value-neutral" socialization and radical sexual indoctrination are robbing many young Americans of their future, their competitiveness, and their cultural inheritance. Leftist — Jim Nelson Black

As David Kennedy correctly observes, "[c]rack blew through America's poor black neighborhoods like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse," leaving behind unspeakable devastation and suffering.82 As a nation, though, we had a choice about how to respond. Some countries faced with rising drug crime or seemingly intractable rates of drug abuse and drug addiction chose the path of drug treatment, prevention, and education or economic investment in crime-ridden communities. Portugal, — Michelle Alexander

It's an incredible education [for the movie J. Edgar Hoover] . It was like I did a college course on J. Edgar Hoover but not knowing and understanding the history and reading the books, but understanding what motivated this man was the most fascinating part of the research. — Dustin Lance Black

Education should aim at destroying free will so that
pupils thus schooled, will be incapable throughout
the rest of their lives of thinking or acting otherwise
than as their schoolmasters would have wished ...
Influences of the home are obstructive; and in order
to condition students, verses set to music and repeatedly
intoned are very effective ... It is for a
future scientist to make these maxims precise and
to discover exactly how much it costs per head to
make children believe that snow is black. When the
technique has been perfected, every government that
has been in charge of education for more than one
generation will be able to control its subjects securely
without the need of armies or policemen. — Bertrand Russell

There were many deficits in our swamp education, but Grandpa Sawtooth, to his credit, taught us the names of whole townships that had been forgotten underwater. Black pioneers, Creek Indians, moonshiners, women, 'disappeared' boy soldiers who deserted their army camps. From Grandpa we learned how to peer beneath the sea-glare of the 'official, historical' Florida records we found in books. "Prejudice," as defined by Sawtooth Bigtree, was a kind of prehistoric arithmetic
a "damn, fool math"
in which some people counted and others did not. It meant white names on white headstones in the big cemetery in Cypress Point, and black and brown bodies buried in swamp water.
At ten, I couldn't articulate much but I got the message: to be a true historian, you had to mourn amply and well. — Karen Russell

Text is linear; it is black and white; it doesn't zoom around the page in 3-D; it isn't intelligent by itself; in fact, in terms of immediate reaction it is quite boring. I can't imagine a single preliterate was ever wowed at the first sight of text, and yet text has been the basis of arguably the most fundamental intellectual transformation of the human species. It and its subforms, such as algebra, have made science education for all a plausible goal. — Andrea DiSessa

The most important person to thank is ... my mother. She gave me four golden rules to live by: be a proud black man, take care of your family, make education a priority, and try to do the right thing. — Edward B. Lewis

Look here, it's all very tidy and convenient to see the world in black and white ... It's a particular passion of young men eager to sweep away their dusty elders. However, philosophical rigidity is usually combined with a complete lack of education or real-world experience, and it is often augmented with strange haircuts and an aversion to bathing. — Helen Simonson

I can't talk about the education of black children if I ignored two of my nieces who were a couple of grade levels behind. I believe that charity begins at home, and I take seriously the role of a godfather to fill the gap when the parents aren't doing their job. — Roland Martin

Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White is remarkable for its truth-telling about two important issues concerning Alabama's past and present: the civil rights movement and immigration. These stories, rendered through the words and eyes of a young Latina girl who came from Argentina to Marion, Alabama, are made vivid and immediate through Weaver's highly accessible drawings and dialogue. This is a book-about maturation, family, education, and social change-every schoolchild, parent, and citizen should experience. — Sena Jeter Naslund

The forces that run in American politics in our age are many and varied; they run in strange ways in our times of general education--they run in the meeting of white and black; in the nagging, daily concern for war and peace; in automation and unemployment. Yet one man must make them all clear enough for American people to vote and express their desire.

He is the President. — Theodore H. White

Violence is black children going to school for 12 years and receiving 6 years' worth of education. — Julian Bond

They who refuse education to a black man would turn the South into a vast poorhouse, and labor into a pendulum, necessity vibrating between poverty and indolence. — Henry Ward Beecher

I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I never thought that Bill Clinton should be the president. When he was running to be the president of the United States, he said on over a hundred occasions, he said the following: He said, 'One of the great accomplishments while I was the governor of Arkansas, was to take my state in education from 50th to 49th.' And I thought, ' you know, Bill, you should keep that a secret. — Lewis Black

The White House, in advancing the agenda for a [school] "choice" plan, rests its faith on market mechanisms. What reason have the black and very poor to lend their credence to a market system that has proved so obdurate and so resistant to their pleas at every turn? — Jonathan Kozol

Practically all of the successful Negroes in this country are of the uneducated type or of that of Negroes who have had no formal education at all. The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people. If after leaving school they have the opportunity to give out to Negroes what traducers of the race would like to have it learn such persons may thereby earn a living at teaching or preaching what they have been taught but they never become a constructive force in the development of the race. The so-called school, then, becomes a questionable factor in the life of this despised people. As another has well said, 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 — Carter G. Woodson

I pray God that whoever will lead our country may be, in his heart, as much Pashtun as Tajik, as much Uzbek as Hazara. That his wife may counsel and assist him; that he may choose advisors of great character and wisdom. That books may replace weapons, that education may teach us to respect one another, that our hospitals may be worthy of their mission, and that our culture may be reborn from the ruins of our pillaged museums. That the camps of famished refugees may disappear from our borders, and that the bread the hungry eat be kneaded by their own hands.

I will do more than pray, because when the last talib has put away his black turban and I can be a free woman in a free Afghanistan, I will take up my life there once more and do my duty as a citizen, as a woman, and, I hope, as a mother. — Latifa

Combining the lack of emotional literacy they may be imbued with, with the fact that if you're black you're not supposed to be that smart and if you ... as a boy you're not even supposed to like school. All of the sudden you've got kids who are afraid, black kids and Latino kids who are afraid to be great, afraid to bask in the enjoyment of education, lest they be labeled less than black, less than Latino, less they be called the oreo. — John Amaechi

Increasing pressure on students to subject themselves to ever more tests, whittling themselves down to rows and rows of tight black integers upon a transcript, all ready to goose-step straight into a computer. — Leah Hager Cohen

Black! Black! Black! I am proud of being a Negro. Nor have I ever tried to beg tolerance from anyone. Superiority is not proved by color, but by the brain, by education, by willpower, by moral courage. — Jose Celso Barbosa

Good motives aside, white condescension does more damage than good. White condescension says to a black child, 'The rules used by other ethnic groups don't apply to you. Forget about work hard, get an education, posses good values. No, for you, we'll alter the rules by lowering the standards and expecting less.' Expect less, get less. — Larry Elder

In the 1960s, college students forcibly occupied administration buildings, demanding courses in "black studies." Today, every major university features full departments (and even some designated dormitories and cafeterias) for a variety of ethnic excogitations. Today, instead of violent sit-ins, there has been a quiet coup by "diversity committees," whose authoritarian thought-police reign on campuses and who banish "politically incorrect" dissenters to the dungeons of re-education seminars. — Ayn Rand

I'm for the poor man - all poor men, black and white, they all gotta have a chance. They gotta have a home, a job, and a decent education for their children. 'Every man a king' - that's my slogan. — Huey Long

Don't terrorize. Organize. Don't burn. Give kids a chance to learn ... The real answer to race problems in this country is education. Not burning and killing. Be ready. Be qualified. Own something. Be somebody. That's Black Power. — James Brown

No segment of the population has lost more by the agendas of the liberal constituencies of the Democratic Party than the black population. The teachers' unions, environmental fanatics and the ACLU are just some of the groups to whose interests blacks have been sacrificed wholesale. Lousy education and high crime rates in the ghettos, and unaffordable housing elsewhere with building restrictions, are devastating prices to pay for liberalism. — Thomas Sowell

I just wish all these young black kids would realize how significant it is to stop acting a fool out there, killing each other, not getting their education. You know, people have died to put us in a situation to be successful. — Charles Barkley

Before playing football, I didn't fit in anywhere. My parents didn't have a lot of money, which they spent on our education to send us to Catholic private school in Oakland, mostly black. The other kids had more money than I did. I started school early; I was young. So I'd come back to my hood and read. — Ryan Coogler

No poor, rural, weak, or black person should ever again have to bear the additional burden of being deprived of the opportunity for an education, a job, or simple justice. — Jimmy Carter

Single women that place high value on Higher Education are often the brunt of snide remarks and smearing put downs by less educated black man ... page 126 — Deborrah Cooper

Media mystifications should not obfuscate a simple, perceivable fact; Black teenage girls do not create poverty by having babies. Quite the contrary, they have babies at such a young age precisely because they are poor
because they do not have the opportunity to acquire an education, because meaningful, well-paying jobs and creative forms of recreation are not accessible to them ... because safe, effective forms of contraception are not available to them. — Angela Davis

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

We have allowed our youths to buy into a culture (hip hop) that has been perverted, corrupted and overtaken by prison culture. The music, attitude and behavior expressed in this culture is anti-black, anti-education, demeaning, self-destructive, pro-drug dealing and violent. — Jason Whitlock

There is nothing of any consequence in education, in the economy, in city planning, in social policy that does not concern black people. — Toni Morrison

But for poor black people and working-class black people, it is a much more difficult way to go. The over-incarceration of black people is just intolerable. When you look at the disparity in terms of education and access to fair schooling, it is horrible. If this would happen to white people in this country, it would not be tolerated. — Michael Eric Dyson

It's like the frog that tried to outdo the cow...see, the consequences are reflected in each of us as individuals. A people so oppressed by the West have no mental leisure, they can't do anything worthwhile. They get an education that's stripped to the bare bone, and they're driven with their noses to the grindstone until they're dizzy -- that's why they all end up with nervous breakdowns. Try talking to them -- they're usually stupid. They haven't thought about a thing beyond themselves, that day, that very instant. They're too exhausted to think about anything else; it's not their fault. Unfortunately, exhaustion of the spirit and deterioration of the body come hand-in-hand. And that's not all. The decline of morality has set in too. Look where you will in this country, you won't find one square inch of brightness. It's all pitch black. So what difference would it make... — Soseki Natsume

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

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

Unlike other features on OkCupid, there is no visual component to match percentage. The number between two people only reflects what you might call their inner selves - everything about what they believe, need, and want, even what they think is funny, but nothing about what they look like. Judging by just this compatibility measure, the four largest racial groups on OkCupid - Asian, black, Latino, and white - all get along about the same.1 In fact, race has less effect on match percentage than religion, politics, or education. Among the details that users believe are important, the closest comparison to race is Zodiac sign, which has no effect at all. To a computer not acculturated to the categories, "Asian" and "black" and "white" could just as easily be "Aries" and "Virgo" and "Capricorn." But this racial neutrality is only in theory; things change once the users' own opinions, and not just the color-blind workings of an algorithm, come into play. — Christian Rudder

A black agenda is jobs, jobs, jobs, quality education, investment in infrastructure and strong democratic regulation of corporations. The black agenda, at its best, looks at America from the vantage point of the least of these and asks what's best for all. — Cornel West

While it is positive for young black males and females to learn discipline and self-responsibility, those attitudes, values, and habits of being can be taught with pedagogical strategies that are liberatory, that do not rely on coercive control and punishment to reinforce positive behavior. — Bell Hooks

We are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, and no amount of education gleaned from our propensity for self-destruction and misguided thinking ever teaches us anything. Not anything that we remember for more than a generation or two.
I think maybe we learn a few things each time that we don't forget. A few things that stick with us. It's just hard to pass those things on to those who come after us because if they didn't live through it, they don't view it the same way we do. If you don't experience something firsthand, it's a lot harder to accept. Terry Brooks, Bearers of the Black Staff, p 89 — Terry Brooks

Education remains one of the black community's most enduring values. It is sustained by the belief that freedom and education go hand in hand, that learning and training are essential to economic quality and independence. — Marian Wright Edelman

Nature is a good teacher; he who can read the nature well, he can learn sagacious things belong to life from it. Once you stepped in the nature, your philosophical education starts. A black vulture teaches you many things; a bear teaches you many things; a bird making its nest and a rosehip which resists being frozen, they teach you many things! — Mehmet Murat Ildan

Our education system is increasingly embracing a black-and-white way of thinking, in which 'learning' and 'play' are diametrically opposed. 'Learning' is the serious stuff that happens inside a classroom and can be measured via multiple choice questions and a No. 2 pencil. 'Play' is frivolous, fun, and worst of all, optional. — Darell Hammond

If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery--skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. — Saidiya V. Hartman

Education is indoctrination if you're white - subjugation if you're black. — James Baldwin

I turn my eyes to the schools & universities of Europe And there behold the loom of Locke whose woof rages dire, Washed by the water-wheels of Newton. Black the cloth In heavy wreaths folds over every nation; cruel works Of many wheels I view, wheel without wheel, with cogs tyrannic Moving by compulsion each other: not as those in Eden, which Wheel within wheel in freedom revolve, in harmony & peace. — William Blake

That reasonably intelligent and well-meaning young people are willing to call white black is a matter of concern. It raises questions about our ways of education and about the values that guide our conduct. — Solomon Asch

The government has departments to deal with the special interest groups that make themselves heard and felt. A Department of Agriculture cares for the farmers' needs. There is a Department of Health, Education and Welfare. There is a Department of the Interior - in which the Indians are included. Is the farmer, the doctor, the Indian, the greatest problem in America today? No - it is the black man! There ought to be a Pentagon-sized Washington department dealing with every segment of the black man's problems. — Malcolm X

Black and white come together.
Brown and blue come to gather.
Boys and girls come with love.
Straight and gay come as a dove.
Jewish and Muslim, open your mind.
Christian and Hindu, be very kind.
Sikh and Buddist come with the sun.
All children, let's have some fun.
We are your children; we are the future.
Let us love and trust each other.
Let not the gun, let not the shored,
But let peace and love win this world. — Debasish Mridha

The truth is that the hard-fought victories of the Civil Rights Movement caused a reaction that stripped Brown of its power, severed the jugular of the Voting Rights Act, closed off access to higher education, poured crack cocaine into the inner cities, and locked up more black men proportionally than even apartheid-era South Africa. — Carol Anderson

He was a good guy, my old man: simple, old-fashioned. Physically, he was built like a feather-weight, and he wore these thick, black Ronnie Barker glasses. He would say to me,'You might not have a good education, but good manners don't cost you anything.' And he practised what he preached: he'd always give up his seat on the bus for a woman or help an old lady across the road.
A good man. I really miss him. — Ozzy Osbourne

They do not expect that the free right to vote, to enjoy civic rights, and to be educated, will come in a moment; they do not expect to see the bias and prejudices of years disappear at the blast of a trumpet; but they are absolutely certain that the way for a people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away and insisting that they do not want them; that the way for a people to gain respect is not by continually belittling and ridiculing themselves; that, on the contrary, Negroes must insist continually, in season and out of season, that voting is necessary to modern manhood, that color discrimination is barbarism, and that black boys need education as well as white boys. — W.E.B. Du Bois

Anyone still attempting to argue that Ebonics is a problem for black students or that it is somehow connected to a lack of intelligence or lack of desire to achieve is about as useful as a Betamax video cassette player, and it's time for those folks to be retired, be they teachers, administrators, or community leaders, so the rest of us can try to do some real work in the service of equal access for black students and all students. (15) — Adam J. Banks