Every February, the United States celebrates Black History Month. It’s a time to draw special attention to the unique history and culture of Black people in our country and around the world. Use these Black History Month quotes as writing prompts, to inspire research projects, or as a jumping-off point for classroom conversations.
Note: Some of these Black History Month quotes use terms such as “Negro” that are considered offensive in modern usage. Give your students historical context around terms such as these before sharing the quotes with them.
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Quotes About Black History
“You’re going to relegate my history to a month? I don’t want a Black History Month. Black history is American history.” -Morgan Freeman
“Black folk, a lot of us lived as victims in a certain part of our history. And we had to really erase that tape. We’re not victims. We are citizens.” -Dorothy Cotton
“The drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his worth.” -Mary McLeod Bethune
“Each day when you see us Black folk upon the dusty land of your farm or upon the hard pavement of your city streets, you usually take it for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not what we seem.” -Richard Wright
“Until the killing of Black men, Black mothers’ sons, becomes as important to the rest of the country as the killing of a white mother’s son, we who believe in freedom cannot rest.” -Ella Baker
“We didn’t have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.” -Rosa Parks
“What is the value of winning access to public accommodations for those who lack money to use them? The minute the movement faced this question, it was compelled to expand its vision beyond race relations to economic relations, including the role of education in modern society.” -Bayard Rustin
“I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching and I have told it so often that I know it by heart. I do not have to embellish; it makes its own way.” -Ida B. Wells
“We Black folk, our history and our present being, are a mirror of all the manifold experiences of America. What we want, what we represent, what we endure is what America is. If we Black folk perish, America will perish.” -Richard Wright
“But we soon got used to freedom, Though the way at first was rough; But we weathered through the tempest, For slavery made us tough.” -Frances Ellen Watkins Harper
“People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.” -Rosa Parks
“‘We, the people.’ It is a very eloquent beginning. But when that document was completed on the seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in that ‘We, the people.’ I felt somehow for many years that George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out by mistake. But through the process of amendment, interpretation and court decision I have finally been included in ‘We, the people.’” -Barbara Jordan
“In this long climb, Negroes have had white allies since the first white Southerner violated the law by teaching slaves to read and write.” -Roy Wilkins
“We are African, and we happened to be in America. We’re not American. We are people who formerly were Africans who were kidnapped and brought to America. Our forefathers weren’t the Pilgrims. We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock. The rock was landed on us. We were brought here against our will. We were not brought here to be made citizens. We were not brought here to enjoy the constitutional gifts that they speak so beautifully about today.” -Malcolm X
“That I am a national figure because I was the first person in 192 years to be at once a congressman, Black, and a woman proves, I would think, that our society is not yet either just or free.” -Shirley Chisholm
“You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise.” -Maya Angelou
“I thought I was going to die a few times. On the Freedom Ride in the year 1961, when I was beaten at the Greyhound bus station in Montgomery, I thought I was going to die. On March 7th, 1965, when I was hit in the head with a nightstick by a State Trooper at the foot of the Edmund Pettus Bridge, I thought I was going to die. I thought I saw death, but nothing can make me question the philosophy of nonviolence.” -John Lewis
“Too many of our young people know only where we are now, not how we got here nor where we are going. Too many see doors only recently opened and do not appreciate how they got pried ajar … We must always be a strong presence, an unrelenting force working for equality and justice until the freedom gates are fully open.” -Dorothy Height
“This is one of the most important moments in the life of our country. I stand here before you filled with deep pride and joy: pride in the ordinary, humble people of this country. You have shown such a calm, patient determination to reclaim this country as your own, and joy that we can loudly proclaim from the rooftops—free at last!” -Nelson Mandela
“Voting and participating in the democratic process are key. The vote is the most powerful nonviolent change agent you have in a democratic society. You must use it because it is not guaranteed. You can lose it.” -John Lewis
“There is work to do; that is why I cannot stop or sit still. As long as a child needs help, as long as people are not free, there will be work to do. As long as an elderly person is attacked or in need of support, there is work to do. As long as we have bigotry and crime, we have work to do.” -Rosa Parks
“A community is democratic only when the humblest and the weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.” -A. Philip Randolph
“If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves and allow those responsible to salve their conscience by believing that they have our acceptance and concurrence. We should, therefore, protest openly everything … that smacks of discrimination or slander.” -Mary McLeod Bethune
“Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born.” -W.E.B. Du Bois
“It is very important to have a great sense of racial identity because I believe it is quite impossible for people to struggle creatively if they do not truly believe in themselves. I believe that dignity is first.” -Bayard Rustin
“I am not anti-white, because I understand that white people, like Black ones, are victims of a racist society. They are products of their time and place.” -Shirley Chisholm
“Our future is in the hands of the young, as it always has been. One generation hands off to the next, and each new generation has its own vision, its own ideals, its own beliefs. That is what it means to be young: you believe.” -John Lewis
“Where the really sincere white people have got to do their ‘proving’ of themselves is not among the Black victims, but out on the battle lines of where America’s racism really is—and that’s in their own home communities.” -Malcolm X
“To those who have said, ‘Be patient and wait,’ we must say that ‘patience’ is a dirty and nasty word. We cannot be patient; we do not want to be free gradually. We want our freedom, and we want it now.” -John Lewis
“We are not fighting for integration, nor are we fighting for separation. We are fighting for recognition as human beings. We are fighting for … human rights.” -Malcolm X
“I wish I could say that racism and prejudice were only distant memories. We must dissent from the indifference. We must dissent from the apathy. We must dissent from the fear, the hatred and the mistrust. … We must dissent because America can do better, because America has no choice but to do better.” -Thurgood Marshall
“Our lives are so diversified, internal attitudes so varied, appearances and capabilities so different, that there is no possible classification so catholic that it will cover us all, except My people! My people!” -Zora Neale Hurston
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”
“History will have to record that the greatest tragedy of this period of social transition was not the strident clamor of the bad people but the appalling silence of the good people.”
“For all of us today, the battle is in our hands. The road ahead is not altogether a smooth one. There are no broad highways to lead us easily and inevitably to quick solutions. We must keep going.”
“We’ve got to give ourselves to this struggle until the end. Nothing would be more tragic than to stop at this point, in Memphis. We’ve got to see it through. And when we have our march, you need to be there. Be concerned about your brother. You may not be on strike, but either we go up together, or we go down together.”
Feminist Black History Month Quotes
“I will not shrink from undertaking what seems wise and good, because I labor under the double handicap of race and sex; but, striving to preserve a calm mind with a courageous, cheerful spirit, barring bitterness from my heart, I will struggle all the more earnestly to reach the goal.” -Mary Church Terrell
“Black women could hardly strive for weakness; they had to become strong, for their families and their communities needed their strength to survive … Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Ida Wells and Rosa Parks are not exceptional Black women as much as they are epitomes of Black womanhood.” -Angela Davis
“Black women, historically, have been doubly victimized by the twin immoralities of Jim Crow and Jane Crow. … Black women, faced with these dual barriers, have often found that sex bias is more formidable than racial bias.” -Pauli Murray
“I really think the range of emotions and perceptions I have had access to as a Black person and as a female person are greater than those of people who are neither. So it seems to me that my world did not shrink because I was a Black female writer. It just got bigger.” -Toni Morrison
“There is a great stir about colored men getting their rights, but not a word about the colored women; and if colored men get their rights, and not colored women theirs, you see the colored men will be masters over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. So I am for keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till it is still, it will take a great while to get it going again.” -Sojourner Truth
“Whenever a conscious Black woman raises her voice on issues central to her existence, somebody is going to call her strident, because they don’t want to hear about it, nor us. I refuse to be silenced and I refuse to be trivialized, even if I do not say what I have to say perfectly.” -Audre Lorde
“No Black woman writer in this culture can write ‘too much.’ Indeed, no woman writer can write ‘too much.’ … No woman has ever written enough.” -bell hooks
“A white woman has only one handicap to overcome—that of sex. I have two—both sex and race. … Colored men have only one—that of race. Colored women are the only group in this country who have two heavy handicaps to overcome, that of race as well as that of sex.” -Mary Church Terrell
“Of course, recognizing our common humanity is only the beginning of our task. Words alone cannot meet the needs of our people. These needs will be met only if we act boldly in the years ahead; and if we understand that the challenges we face are shared, and our failure to meet them will hurt us all.” -Barack Obama
“For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.” -Neil deGrasse Tyson
![Many whites, even white Southerners, told me that even though it may have seemed like the Blacks were being freed [by my actions] they felt more free and at ease themselves. They thought that my action didn't just free Blacks but them, too.](https://teachersconnect.co/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/1706097394_165_101-Powerful-Black-History-Month-Quotes.jpg "Many whites, even white Southerners, told me that even though it may have seemed like the Blacks were being freed [by my actions] they felt more free and at ease themselves. They thought that my action didn’t just free Blacks but them, too.")
