You are on the eve of a complete victory. You can't go wrong. The world is behind you.
Josephine BakerRead
One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black. It was only a country for white people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States... A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn't stand it anymore... I felt liberated in Paris.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the feeling of liberation from racial oppression through the experience of leaving a hostile environment.
Josephine Baker's quote reflects her profound realization of the restrictive environment she faced in the United States due to her race. It highlights the painful choice to leave one's homeland not out of desire but necessity for freedom and acceptance, illustrating the struggle against systemic racism and the quest for a place where one can truly be oneself.
In practice
In a speech about empowerment at a civil rights event.
You are on the eve of a complete victory. You can't go wrong. The world is behind you.
I ran away from St. Louis, and then I ran away from the United States, because of that terror of discrimination.
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.
Lord, may the pain be ours, And the weakness that it brings, But at least give us the strength, Of not showing it to anyone!
Again I admonish you not to be turned from your stern purpose of defending your beloved country and its free institutions by any arguments urged by ambitious and designing men, but stand fast to the Union and the old flag.
I'm armed with more than complete steel, - The justice of my quarrel.
The IWW [Industrial Workers of the World] has been accused of pushing women to the front. This is not true. Rather, the women have not been kept in back, and so they have naturally moved to the front.
When, after the accident, I came out into the world and people looked at me, they were shocked. It upset me. I thought they were impolite not to hide their negative emotions about my look.
I went to Boston fully expecting to be arrested - arrested by a polizia created by a government that my ancestors rebelled to establish.
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