Quotes from Carter G. Woodson

Let us banish fear.

The different ness of races, moreover, is no evidence of superiority or of inferiority. This merely indicates that each race has certain gifts which the others do not possess.

The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers.

They still have some money, and they have needs to supply. They must begin immediately to pool their earnings and organize industries to participate in supplying social and economic demands.

Those who have no record of what their forebears have accomplished lose the inspiration which comes from the teaching of biography and history.

What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice.

And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race.

I am not afraid of being sued by white businessmen. In fact, I should welcome such a law suit.

We do not show the Negro how to overcome segregation, but we teach him how to accept it as final and just.

If the white man wants to hold on to it, let him do so; but the Negro, so far as he is able, should develop and carry out a program of his own.

Our most widely known scholars have been trained in universities outside of the South.

The so-called modern education, with all its defects, however, does others so much more good than it does the Negro, because it has been worked out in conformity to the needs of those who have enslaved and oppressed weaker peoples.

When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions.

As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.

The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people.

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated.

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

Truth must be dug up from the past and presented to the circle of scholastics in scientific form and then through stories and dramatizations that will permeate our educational system.

Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority.

Truth comes to us from the past, then, like gold washed down from the mountains.

In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them.

The mere imparting of information is not education.

Negroes who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities for development are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination.

The large majority of the Negroes who have put on the finishing touches of our best colleges are all but worthless in the development of their people.