At a time when school boards are voting to remove Black history from curriculums and the state of Florida approved harmful academic standards stating that “slaves developed skills which, in some instances, could be applied for their personal benefit,” it’s crucial to recognise the Black trailblazers who pushed forward voting rights, put an end to discriminatory Jim Crow laws and refused to allow future generations of Black people to suffer the same discrimination and abuse that they did.
While well-known figureheads, such as Martin Luther King Jr., John Lewis and Ruby Bridges, have received lots of recognition (but still not enough), lesser-known civil rights leaders — Bayard Rustin, Diane Nash and many more — deserve to be known, too.
Without the work of Black leaders on the front lines and behind the scenes, the progress seen today would likely not exist. Though Black people still face racism, unfair challenges and discrimination within many systems in this world, it’s easy to forget that major progress has been made in recent years. It’s been just 60 years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed, which ended Jim Crow laws that protected segregation.
It remains true that we can’t move forward if we don’t know our history, and, beyond that, we can’t move forward without commitment to change and hard work.
So as the fight continues, take time to be inspired by the Black leaders who led the charge for freedom and equality. Read on for their powerful quotes:
1. “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them.”
— Ida B. Wells, an investigative journalist and one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, in “The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader”
2. “We have been too quiet for too long. There comes a time when you have to say something. You have to make a little noise. You have to move your feet. This is the time.”
— John Lewis, a former congressman, Freedom Rider and chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, at a House sit-in after the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando, Florida
3. “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
— Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., a minister and civil rights activist, in a speech at the Washington National Cathedral in 1968
4. “Sometimes it seems like to tell the truth today is to run the risk of being killed. But if I fall, I’ll fall 5 feet 4 inches forward in the fight for freedom.”
— Fannie Lou Hamer, a voting rights leader and co-founder of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, wrote in an essay
5. “Black Power simply means: Look at me, I’m here. I have dignity. I have pride. I have roots. I insist, I demand that I participate in those decisions that affect my life and the lives of my children. It means that I am somebody.”
— Whitney M. Young Jr., executive director of the National Urban League, as cited in the PBS documentary “The Power Broker: Whitney Young’s Fight for Civil Rights”
6. “Give light and people will find the way.”
— Ella Baker, former director of branches for the NAACP, referencing the title of a social justice training workshop at the Highlander Folk School in Tennessee
7. “Rule-following, legal precedence and political consistency are not more important than right, justice and plain common-sense.”
— W.E.B. Du Bois, a founding member of the NAACP, wrote in “Black Reconstruction”
8. “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, the first Black Supreme Court justice, at the acceptance speech for the Liberty Medal in 1992
9. “I would like to be remembered as a person who wanted to be free … so other people would be also free.”
— Rosa Parks, a leader of the Montgomery, Alabama, bus boycott, quoted in the 1987 PBS documentary “Eyes on the Prize”
10. “The civil rights movement didn’t begin in Montgomery and it didn’t end in the 1960s. It continues on to this very minute.”
— Julian Bond, co-founder and first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center
11. “The only master race is the human race, and we are all, by the grace of God, members of it.”
— Roy Wilkins, former NAACP executive director, in his 1994 autobiography
12. “Racism is a grown-up disease, and it is time we stop using kids to spread it.”
— Ruby Bridges, the first Black child to integrate her whites-only elementary school in New Orleans, said in a speech in New Jersey in 2016
13. “People will never fight for your freedom if you have not given evidence that you are prepared to fight for it yourself.”
— Bayard Rustin, an organizer of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, said in a 1986 interview about gay rights
14. “We beg you to save young America from the blight of race prejudice. Do not bind the children within the narrow circles of your own lives.”
— Charles Hamilton Houston, the former dean of the Howard University Law School and the first general counsel of the NAACP, at the national YWCA convention in Philadelphia in 1934
15. “I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong.”
— Frederick Douglass, a leader in the abolitionist movement, in a speech in Rochester, New York, in 1855
16. “Freedom, by definition, is people realizing that they are their own leaders.”
— Diane Nash, Freedom Rider and founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee