Quotes About History

Federal Writers' Project, which collected the life stories of former slaves in the 1930s.

Stulna kroppar som arbetade på stulen mark.

the immense exertion white people put into grinding them down

She threw him a bone about the movement: 'Lyndon Johnson's carrying on President Kennedy's civil rights bill. And if that good old boy is doing right, you know things is changing. Be a whole different thing when you come home, Elwood.

if a bird could be taught limericks, a slave might be taught to remember as well. Merely glancing at the size of the skulls told you that a nigger possessed a bigger brain than a bird.

Con el tiempo les fueron quitando a palos las palabras del otro lado del océano. Por simplificar, por borrarles la identidad, por sofocar revueltas.

When black blood was money, the savvy businessman knew to open the vein.

The words from across the ocean were beaten out of them over time. For simplicity, to erase their identities, to smother uprisings.

Stolen bodies working stolen land.

In effect, they abolished slavery. On the contrary, Oney Garrison said in response. We abolished niggers.

When she got older, she described herself as a student of American history, attuned to the inevitable. She said that white towns had simply banded together to rid themselves of the black stronghold in their midst. That is how the European tribes operate, she said. If they can't control it, they destroy it.

They rounded up the Indians in camps, the women and children and whatever they could carry on their backs, and marched them west of the Mississippi. The Trail of Tears and Death

Black hands built the White House

Is this the truth of our historic encounter?

There had been no kidnapped boys swabbing the decks and earning pats on the head from white kidnappers.

America was a ghost in the darkness

The Great War had always been between the white and the black. It always would be. Cora

The class focused on US history since the Civil War, but at every opportunity Mr. Hill guided them to the present, linking what had happened a hundred years ago to their current lives. They'd set off down one road at the beginning of class and it always led back to their doorsteps.

She was surrounded by men and women who'd been born in Africa, or born in chains, who had freed themselves or escaped. Branded, beaten, raped. Now they were here. They were free and black and stewards of their own fates. It made her shiver.

Memory is the past with volume control.

I would represent my country, the Republic of Anhedonia. We have no borders, but the population teems. No one has deigned to write down our history, but we are an ancient land, founded during the original disappointments, when the first person met another person.

Who knew the havoc and ruin they'd perpetrate if allowed to run free among decent people. Best to keep them all in here, on this island, bought for twenty-seven bucks from the Indians, the story went. Twenty-seven bucks went a lot further in those days.

The Theresa desegregated in 1940, after the neighborhood tipped over from Jews and Italians and became the domain of Southern blacks and West Indians. Everyone who came uptown had crossed some variety of violent ocean.

She understood that the library would be empty if these scholars knew Fulton was colored. No one would have worshipped him, his books probably would never have been published at all, or would exist under a different name, the name of the plagiarizing white man Fulton had been fool enough to share his theories with.