If there's hell below, we're all gonna go.
Curtis MayfieldRead
Being a young black man, observing and sensing the need for race equality and women's rights, I wrote about what was important to me.
Interpretation
The quote expresses the importance of advocating for equality and rights based on personal experiences and observations.
Curtis Mayfield reflects on his identity as a young Black man and the social issues he was aware of, particularly race equality and women's rights. By voicing these concerns through his writing, he underscores the significance of personal experiences in shaping social justice narratives and the role of artists in promoting awareness and change.
In practice
Using this quote in a speech about social activism to highlight the roles of individuals in demanding change.
If there's hell below, we're all gonna go.
My teacher told me I'd never amount to anything. I left high school at 15, after one year. But my real teachers were all the people around me. And I was a good listener.
How many 54-year-old quadriplegics are putting albums out? You just have to deal with what you got, try to sustain yourself as best you can, and look to the things that you can do.
Reading the script, I started feeling very deeply bad for Freddie. Between his friends, his partners, and his woman, he was catching a hard time. 'Freddie's Dead' came to me immediately.
I was a very observant child. Almost anything could become a song to me.
I don't like to appoint myself to nothing, knowing I'm no better than anybody else. But it always makes me feel good to know I try to do the best I can, and those who might observe say, 'Hey, I can take a little something from that person.'
Once labeled a felon, you are ushered into a parallel social universe. You can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits - forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind.
There's a full-court press to put down an uprising around Ferguson, but no preparation for lifting up the people there.
In Western Australia, minerals are being dug up from Aboriginal land and shipped to China for a profit of a billion dollars a week. In this, the richest, 'booming' state, the prisons bulge with stricken Aboriginal people, including juveniles whose mothers stand at the prison gates, pleading for their release. The incarceration of black Australians here is eight times that of black South Africans during the last decade of apartheid.
There are vivid memories from my childhood - what we had to go through because of low wages and the conditions, basically because there was no union. I suppose, if I wanted to be fair, I could say that I'm trying to settle a personal score. I could dramatize it by saying that I want to bring social justice to farm workers.
We're criminalizing economic inability to stay out of the system. Women get penalized more than men for the same crime; blacks get penalized more than whites for the same crime. We need to bring out more into the light, because it's not fair... I applaud Colin Kaepernick for speaking out.
It's not white versus black any more, it's haves versus have-nots. Unless the black middle-classes unite to promote the interests of the black underclass, tension between them is inevitable. What we, the black middle class have to do, is think of a strategy to avert that.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.