Carter G. Woodson's Quotes

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

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

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.

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.

Negro banks, as a rule, have failed because the people, taught that their own pioneers in business cannot function in this sphere, withdrew their deposits.

The author takes the position that the consumer pays the tax, and as such every individual of the social order should be given unlimited opportunity to make the most of himself.

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.

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.

If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.

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.

In fact, the confidence of the people is worth more than money.

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

I am ready to act, if I can find brave men to help me.

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.

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 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 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.

The mere imparting of information is not education.

If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.

The thought of' the inferiority of the Negro is drilled into him in almost every class he enters and in almost every book he studies.

I am a radical.

The strongest bank in the United States will last only so long as the people will have sufficient confidence in it to keep their money there.