Quotes About Legacy

was trying to explain to someone else that the situation of the Irish a hundred years ago and the situation of the Negro today cannot very usefully be compared. Negroes were brought here in chains long before the Irish ever thought of leaving Ireland; what manner of consolation is it to be told that emigrants arriving here—voluntarily—long after you did have risen far above you? In

and you could see that Mrs. Hunt had been a very beautiful girl down there in Atlanta, where she comes from. And she still had - has - that look, that don't-you-touch-me look, that women who were beautiful carry with them to the grave.

It seems to be typical of life in America, where opportunities, real and fancied, are thicker than anywhere else on the globe, that the second generation has no time to talk to the first.

It's painful, sometimes, to look back on a life and wonder if anything you did could have made any difference. So much is lost; and what's lost is lost forever. Was it destined to be lost, or could we have saved it?

What passes for identity in America is a series of myths about one's heroic ancestors.

For this is your home, my friend, do not be driven from it; great men have done great things here, and will again, and we can make America what America must become.

The paradox—and a fearful paradox it is—is that the American Negro can have no future anywhere, on any continent, as long as he is unwilling to accept his past. To accept one's past—one's history—is not the same thing as drowning in it; it is learning how to use it.

It is a fact that every American Negro bears a name that originally belonged to the white man whose chattel he was. I am called Baldwin because I was either sold by my African tribe or kidnapped out of it into the hands of a white Christian named Baldwin, who forced me to kneel at the foot of the cross. I am, then, both visibly and legally the descendant of slaves in a white, Protestant country, and this is what it means to be an American Negro, this is who he is—

this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them...

Know whence you came. If you know whence you came, there is really no limit to where you can go.

Even the most incorrigible maverick has to be born somewhere. He may leave the group that produced him - he may be forced to - but nothing will efface his origins, the mark of which he carries with him everywhere. I think it is important to know this and even find it a matter for rejoicing, as the strongest people do, regardless of their station.

I remembered his older brother, who had died in Sicily, in battle for the free world- he had barely had time to see Sicily before he died and had assuredly never seen the free world.

Where you lead me, I said, I'll follow. He laughed. Baby. Baby. Baby. I love you. And I'm going to build us a table and a whole lot of folks going to be eating off it for a long, long time to come.

We human beings now have the power to exterminate ourselves; this seems to be the entire sum of our achievement.

Elijah Muhammad himself has now been carrrying the same message for more than thirty years; he is not an overnight sensation, and we owe his ministry, I am told, to the fact that when he was a child of six or so, his father was lynched before his eyes. (So much for states' rights.)

It will be hard, James, but you come from sturdy, peasant stock, men who picked cotton and dammed rivers and built railroads, and, in the teeth of the most terrifying odds, achieved an unassailable and monumental dignity.

One is responsible to life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return. One must negotiate this as nobly as possible, for the sake of those who are coming after us

With the best will in the world, no one now living could undo what past generations had accomplished. The great question was what, exactly, had they accomplished: whether the evil, of which there had been so much, alone lived after them, whether the good, and there had been some, had been interred with their bones.

The people did not go away, of course; once a people arise, they never go away (a fact which should be included in the Marine handbook).

the failure and the betrayal are in the record book forever, and sum up, and condemn, forever, those descendants of a barbarous Europe who arbitrarily and arrogantly reserve the right to call themselves Americans.

What is it you wanted me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost 60 years ago, I'm not gonna live another 60 years. You always told me it takes time. It's taken my father's time, my mother's time. My uncle's time. My brother's and my sister's time. My nieces' and my nephews' time. How much time do you want? For your progress.

History does not refer merely to the past, history is literally present in all that we do

Joyce is right about history being a nightmare - but it may be the nightmare from which one *can* awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.

Joyce is right about history being a nightmare - but it may be the nightmare from which no one *can* awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them.