You are on the eve of a complete victory. You can't go wrong. The world is behind you.
Josephine BakerRead
I ran away from St. Louis, and then I ran away from the United States, because of that terror of discrimination.
Interpretation
This quote reflects the courage to escape discrimination in search of freedom.
Josephine Baker's quote highlights her profound sense of fear and discrimination, which propelled her to flee St. Louis and the United States. It speaks to the struggles faced by individuals who seek to escape oppression and find dignity and acceptance elsewhere, demonstrating the lengths one might go to in pursuit of personal freedom and safety.
In practice
In a speech about civil rights, you might say, 'As Josephine Baker once expressed, I ran away from St. Louis, seeking freedom from discrimination.'
You are on the eve of a complete victory. You can't go wrong. The world is behind you.
Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.
I did take the blows [of life], but I took them with my chin up, in dignity, because I so profoundly love and respect humanity.
You must get an education. You must go to school, and you must learn to protect yourself. And you must learn to protect yourself with the pen, and not the gun.
I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more.
Surely the day will come when color means nothing more than the skin tone, when religion is seen uniquely as a way to speak one's soul; when birth places have the weight of a throw of the dice and all men are born free, when understanding breeds love and brotherhood.
I'm a human being I'm not a piece of property. I am not a consignment of goods.
We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. We must remember always that accusation is not proof and that conviction depends upon evidence and due process of law. We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason, if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine, and remember that we are not descended from fearful men β not from men who feared to write, to speak, to associate, and to defend causes that were, for the moment, unpopular.
We have not journeyed all this way because we are made of sugar candy.
I hope you either take up parachute jumping or stay out of single motored airplanes at night.
A crystalline moment shatters, and the world is a different place. Where there was confinement, now there is release. Recoiling from my sudden liberation, my left arm flings downcanyon, opening my shoulders to the south, and I fall back against the northern wall of the canyon, my mind is surfing on euphoria. As I stare at the wall where not twelve hours ago I etched βRIP OCT 75 ARON APR 03,β a voice shouts in my head: I AM FREE!
Don't be ashamed to need help. Like a soldier storming a wall, you have a mission to accomplish. And if you've been wounded and you need a comrade to pull you up? So what?
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