African Americans Quotes
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I have a very personal interest. I am a Miami-Dade voter. One of the issues is that my vote and so many other votes of women and African Americans in Florida are being discounted or discarded. I want my vote to count.
Patricia Ireland
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Takes a whole lot of empathic effort to step into those of black people and see the world through the eyes of African Americans.
James Hal Cone
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Speaking of African Americans, the horrors of the African slave trade are more connected to the enslavement unleashed by Columbus than most people realize.26 The Portuguese began enslaving and exporting the native peoples of Labrador beginning in 1501. Early in colonial history, the British paid some tribes to capture members of other tribes; the British then sold these captives as slaves. Charleston, South Carolina, was a center for exporting indigenous American slaves before it became a center for importing African ones. Having developed a taste and skill for enslavement of the Tainos, Arawaks, and others in the New World, European colonizers quickly turned to Africa for additional “stock” for their slave market. Even Bartolomé de las Casas at one point recommended importing African slaves so that the indigenous peoples could be released, a recommendation he later regretted and repudiated.
Brian D. McLaren
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Speaking of African Americans, the horrors of the African slave trade are more connected to the enslavement unleashed by Columbus than most people realize. The Portuguese began enslaving and exporting the native peoples of Labrador beginning in 1501. Early in colonial history, the British paid some tribes to capture members of other tribes; the British then sold these captives as slaves. Charleston, South Carolina, was a center for exporting indigenous American slaves before it became a center for importing African ones. Having developed a taste and skill for enslavement of the Tainos, Arawaks, and others in the New World, European colonizers quickly turned to Africa for additional “stock” for their slave market. Even Bartolomé de las Casas at one point recommended importing African slaves so that the indigenous peoples could be released, a recommendation he later regretted and repudiated.
Brian D. McLaren
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African-Americans who might have disagreed with candidate Barack Obama's left-of-center politics voted for him in 2008 because electing a candidate with brown skin was too historic an opportunity to miss.
Alveda King
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When you compare what people endured in the South in the 60s to try to get the right to vote for African Americans, and to compare what people were subjected to there to what happened in Philadelphia - which was inappropriate, certainly that . . . to describe it in those terms I think does a great disservice to people who put their lives on the line, who risked all, for my people.
Eric Holder
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African Americans watch the same news at night that ordinary Americans do.
Bill Clinton
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And different traditions stress different - so then there's that. I talked to an African American who says before she goes into an interracial church, she sits in her car and she listens to gospel music to get her fill, and she goes into an interracial church where they don't do gospel music, and she's ready to accept the other sorts of ways of worshipping. So there's that.
Michael Emerson
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While white mob violence against African Americans was an obsession in the South, it was not limited to that region. White supremacy was and is an American reality. Whites lynched blacks in nearly every state, including New York, Minnesota, and California. Wherever blacks were present in significant numbers, the threat of being lynched was always real. Blacks had to “watch their step,” no matter where they were in America. A black man could be walking down the road, minding his business, and his life could suddenly change by meeting a white man or a group of white men or boys who on a whim decided to have some fun with a Negro; and this could happen in Mississippi or New York, Arkansas, or Illinois. By the 1890s, lynching fever gripped the South, spreading like cholera, as white communities made blacks their primary target, and torture their focus. Burning the black victim slowly for hours was the chief method of torture. Lynching became a white media spectacle, in which prominent newspapers, like the Atlanta Constitution, announced to the public the place, date, and time of the expected hanging and burning of black victims. Often as many as ten to twenty thousand men, women, and children attended the event. It was a family affair, a ritual celebration of white supremacy, where women and children were often given the first opportunity to torture black victims—burning black flesh and cutting off genitals, fingers, toes, and ears as souvenirs. Postcards were made from the photographs taken of black victims with white lynchers and onlookers smiling as they struck a pose for the camera. They were sold for ten to twenty-five cents to members of the crowd, who then mailed them to relatives and friends, often with a note saying something like this: “This is the barbeque we had last night.
James Hal Cone
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We've had now eight years and there's this prideful sense among many African Americans. When you think about how elated they are when they see the First Lady on magazine covers or when she is out doing her thing. There just this pride our community has had for eight years now. When that goes away, I jokingly said it, but I do think there's going to be a bit of withdrawal.
Ed Gordon
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Once in a while you get people that maybe because of economic reasons, or have a social network, they get attracted. But it's a very tiny percent so that when we look at, you know, who are pastors and who are the head clergy of these congregations, they're overwhelmingly white, just a few African Americans, and those folks are usually called to what were formerly white congregations, or they started interracial church from the get-go.
Michael Emerson
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Every pastor I talk to says, and particularly if they're African American they'll say, "I'm not black enough for African Americans. I'm not white enough for the whites. I'm not Hispanic enough."
Michael Emerson
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What happens is sometimes these congregations will still have the white style of worship, even though they're mixed, because folks are willing to give up whatever they may have come with. So it's still quite a stretch for African Americans, yeah.
Michael Emerson
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They had a tremendous impact. Not just because they underscore that this is a civil rights question, but they're making it clear this is a question of fairness that affects real families, including Latinos and African Americans many of whom are the most vulnerable when discriminatorily excluded from marriage.
Evan Wolfson
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It may be changing, but still it's the one place, that total control of an institution, that African Americans have. So sometimes, you know, you'll hear the statement of African Americans saying, "I have to work with whites.
Michael Emerson
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While he was in the service, in the South and in Oklahoma, he was refused service at a couple of places where he was in uniform, and was told that African Americans, blacks, Negros, were not served. And in spite of that, I've never known a man who loved this country more than my father did.
Eric Holder
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The struggle of African Americans is everybody's struggle.
Eric Garcetti
