I speak for the colored women of the South, because it is there that the millions of blacks in this country have watered the soil with blood and tears, and it is there too that the colored woman of America has made her characteristic history and there her destiny is evolving.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the struggles and contributions of Black women in the South as vital to American history.
In this quote, Anna Julia Cooper speaks to the profound experiences of Black women in the Southern United States, highlighting their sacrifices and the pivotal role they have played in shaping the nation's history. By acknowledging the 'blood and tears' that have watered the soil, she points to the deep-rooted struggles against oppression, while also asserting that their history is significant and their future is still being forged through resilience and strength.
In practice
This quote can be used in a speech addressing the importance of recognizing the contributions of marginalized communities in history.
It is not the intelligent woman v. the ignorant woman; nor the white woman v. the black, the brown, and the red, it is not even the cause of woman v. man. Nay, tis woman's strongest vindication for speaking that the world needs to hear her voice.
Let woman's claim be as broad in the concrete as the abstract. We take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injustice of all special favoritism, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. If one link of the chain is broken, the chain is broken.
Bullies are always cowards at heart and may be credited with a pretty safe instinct in scenting their prey.
I constantly felt (as I suppose many an ambitious girl has felt) a thumping from within unanswered by any beckoning from without.
The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class - it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.
Peace produced by suppression is neither natural nor desirable.
So I have cultivated the vast garden of human experience which is history, without troubling myself overmuch about laws, essential first causes, or how it is all coming out.
There is this tradition, stretching back to Tacitus and Plutarch, that history belongs to the heroes, the emperors. But I grew up among simple people, and their stories just shattered me. It was painful that no one but me was listening to them.
The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
History consists, for the greater part, of the miseries brought upon the world by pride, ambition, avarice, revenge, lust, sedition, hypocrisy, ungoverned zeal, and all the train of disorderly appetite.
The Holocaust is a sacred subject. One should take off one's shoes when entering its domain, one should tremble each time one pronounces the word.
The whole period of the '60s changed a lot of us; there was never a decade like that in American history... to have the decade capture one of the great accomplishments of this century: man landing on the moon.
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