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.'
This stereotype that Black and brown boys and girls are dangerous or threatening has normalized systems of trauma: the cradle to prison pipeline, foster care, youth detention, and being tried and sentenced as adults. We treat trauma with more trauma.
When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem.
Things have become considerably better for men of colour since I was born. But I'd say that we'll be really getting somewhere when things get better for women of colour.
We live in an interconnected world, in an interconnected time, and we need holistic solutions. We have a crisis of inequality, and we need climate solutions that solve that crisis.
The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.
My activism did not spring from being black...The racial injustice that was present in this country during my youth was a challenge to my belief in the oneness of the human family.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.