Carter G. Woodson Quotes

The mere imparting of information is not education. Above all things, the effort must result in making a man think and do for himself.

If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

No man knows what he can do until he tries.

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.

The real servant of the people must live among them, think with them, feel for them, and die for them.

In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them.

For me, education means to inspire people to live more abundantly, to learn to begin with life as they find it and make it better.

The mere imparting of information is not education.

You must give your own story to the world.

The oppressor has always indoctrinated the weak with his interpretation of the crimes of the strong.

In the long run, there is not much discrimination against superior talent.

One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists.

In fact, the confidence of the people is worth more than money.

The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.

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.

The race needs workers, not leaders.

Truth must be dug up from the past and presented to the circle of scholastics in scientific form and then through stories and dramatizations that will permeate our educational system.

At this moment, then, the Negroes must begin to do the very thing which they have been taught that they cannot do.

What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.

And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race.

The different ness of races, moreover, is no evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not possess.

Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?

This crusade is much more important than the anti- lynching movement, because there would be no lynching if it did not start in the schoolroom.

If the white man wants to hold on to it, let him do so; but the Negro, so far as he is able, should develop and carry out a program of his own.

Truth comes to us from the past, then, like gold washed down from the mountains.

They still have some money, and they have needs to supply. They must begin immediately to pool their earnings and organize industries to participate in supplying social and economic demands.

I am ready to act, if I can find brave men to help me.

Negroes who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities for development are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination.

The author takes the position that the consumer pays the tax, and as such every individual of the social order should be given unlimited opportunity to make the most of himself.

Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority.

We do not show the Negro how to overcome segregation, but we teach him how to accept it as final and just.

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

The strongest bank in the United States will last only so long as the people will have sufficient confidence in it to keep their money there.

Negro banks, as a rule, have failed because the people, taught that their own pioneers in business cannot function in this sphere, withdrew their deposits.

The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers.

If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.

Our most widely known scholars have been trained in universities outside of the South.

I am not afraid of being sued by white businessmen. In fact, I should welcome such a law suit.

Let us banish fear. We have been in this mental state for three centuries. I am a radical. I am ready to act, if I can find brave men to help me.