Explore Quotes by Carter G. Woodson

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

This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift; it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 mere imparting of information is not education.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

The present system under the control of the whites trains the Negro to be white and at the same time convinces him of the impropriety or the impossibility of his becoming white... the Negros will have no outlet but to go down a blind alley, if the sort of education which they are now receiving is to enable them to find the way out of their present difficulties.