Septima Clark Quotes & Sayings

What we are working for is an educational program that has become a resource and rallying point for scores of brave southerners who are leading the fight for justice and better race relations in these crucial days — Septima Poinsette Clark

I believe unconditionally in the ability of people to respond when they are told the truth. We need to be taught to study rather than believe, to inquire rather than to affirm. — Septima Poinsette Clark

The air has finally gotten to the place that we can breathe it together. — Septima Poinsette Clark

I have great belief in the fact that whenever there is chaos, it creates wonderful thinking. I consider chaos a gift. — Septima Poinsette Clark

I just tried to create a little chaos. Chaos is a good thing. God created the whole world out of it. Change is what comes of it. — Septima Poinsette Clark

[Rosa Louise] Parks used to say, "Everybody looks at me because I sat down once in Montgomery, but the real hero is a woman named Septima Clark."She created the Citizenship Schools [where civil-rights activists taught basic literacy and political education classes]. — Marian Wright Edelman

I never felt that getting angry would do you any good other than hurt your own digestion, keep you from eating, which I liked to do. — Septima Poinsette Clark

My philosophy is such that I am not going to vote against the oppressed. I have been oppressed, and so I am always going to have avote for the oppressed, regardless of whether that oppressed is black or white or yellow or the people of the Middle East, or what. I have that feeling. — Septima Poinsette Clark

The greatest evil in our country today is...ignorance...We need to be taught to study rather than to believe. — Septima Poinsette Clark

There are heroes and, emphatically, heroines enough in this history. Yielding to the temptation to focus on their courage, however, may miss the point. Part of the legacy of people like Ella Baker and Septima Clark is a faith that ordinary people who learn to believe in themselves are capable of extraordinary acts, or better, of acts that seem extraordinary to us precisely because we have such an impoverished sense of the capabilities of ordinary people. — Charles M. Payne