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Appendix
- Caring
- Cooperation
- Community
- Continuity
- Conflict
- Colonialism
- Courage
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Home
About
Appendix
- Caring
- Cooperation
- Community
- Continuity
- Conflict
- Colonialism
- Courage
Contact

Colonialism

Colonialism is alive and well – from Palestine and Yemen to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Haiti and Puerto Rico. All over the world, colonized peoples struggle for liberation from horrific violence. One of the most critical connections to make in this moment is simple: all of our suffering, from the imperial core to the Global South, is tied directly to the skyrocketing profits of capitalists – and their pet politicians. We need each other – to break one another’s bonds, and to stand in solidarity with one another’s goals for a more just world. In our shared oppression, we can forge a shared partnership that is stronger than any one people or nation.

“The Black voice must be heard in all spaces.”

Éle Semog, Brazil

“Sins, like chickens, come home to roost.”

Charles Chesnutt, USA

“Anything that is as old as racism is in the blood line of the nation…”

Nannie Burroughs, USA

“The system conceded to black people the right to sit up in the front of the bus – a hollow victory when one’s longest trip is likely to be from the feudal South to the mechanized poverty of the North.”

Julian Bond, USA

“The past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.”

James Baldwin, USA

“White Americans today don’t know what in the world to do because when they put us behind them, that’s where they made their mistake. If they had put us in front, they wouldn’t have let us look back. But they put us behind them, and we watched every move they made.”

Fannie Lou Hamer, USA

“Some white people are so accustomed to operating at a competitive advantage that when the playing field is level, they feel handicapped.”

Nathan McCall, USA

“When something happened to the Negroes in the South, I said, ‘That’s their business, not mine.’ Now I know how wrong I was. The murder of my son has shown me that what happens to any of us, anywhere in the world, had better be the business of us all.”

Mamie Till-Mobley [mother of Emmett Till]

“A bridge is repaired only when someone falls into the water.”

Unknown, Somali

“Surely, God had put his curse not alone upon the slave, but upon the stealer of men? … The weed had been cut down, but its root remained, deeply imbedded in the soil, to spring up and trouble a new generation.”

Charles Chesnutt, USA

“As legal slavery passed, we entered into a permanent period of unemployment and underemployment from which we have yet to emerge.”

Julian Bond, USA

“Slavery is gone, but the spirit of it still remains.”

Francis Grimké, USA

“One of the main purveyors of violence in this world has been this country.”

Danny Glover, USA

“The bare idea of educating the coloured people scared our cruel oppressors almost to death.”

David Walker, USA

“There was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty.”

W. E. B. Du Bois, USA

“The black man cannot protect a country, if the country doesn’t protect him; and if, tomorrow, a war should arise, I would not raise a musket to defend a country where my manhood is denied.”

Henry McNeal Turner, USA

“A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.”

Martin Luther King, USA.

“[It was 1619.] A strange ship, indeed, by all accounts, a frightening ship, a ship of mystery [rode the tide in from the sea, sails unfurled, flag drooping at her rounded stern.] Her port of call, an English settlement, Jamestown, in the colony of Virginia. She came, she traded, and shortly afterwards was gone. Probably no ship in modern history has carried a more portentous freight. Her cargo? Twenty slaves.”

J. Saunders Redding, USA

“There is no freedom without justice, and there is no justice without equality.”

Jurema Werneck

“There is nothing more dangerous than to build a society with a large segment of people in that society who feel like they have no stake in it; who feel that they have nothing to lose. People who have a stake in their society, protect that society, but when they don’t have it, they unconsciously want to destroy it.”

Martin Luther King, USA

“Ol’ rabbit think experience cost too much when you get it from a trap.”

Unknown, African American

“We really need to get over this love affair with the fetus and start worrying about children.”

Joycelyn Elders, USA

“Let’s trace the birth of an idea. It’s born as rampant radicalism, then it becomes progressivism, then liberation, then it becomes moderate, conservative, outmoded,and gone.”

Adam Clayton Powell, USA

“You degrade us and then ask why we are degraded —you shut our mouths and then ask why we don’t speak —you close your colleges and seminaries against us, and then ask why we don’t know more.”

Frederick Douglass, USA

“This is one of the glories of man, the inventiveness of the human mind and the human spirit: whenever life doesn’t seem to give an answer, we create one.”

Lorraine Hansberry, USA

“Small ax fell big tree.”

Unknown, Jamaica

“If you think you’re too small to make a difference, try spending the night with a mosquito.”

African

Get involved in an issue that you’re passionate about. It almost doesn’t matter what it is–improving the school system, developing strategies to wean ourselves off foreign oil, expanding health care for kids. We give too much of our power away, to the professional politicians, to the lobbyists, to cynicism. And our democracy suffers as a result.”

Barack Obama, USA

“Men who are deaf to the claims of mercy, and oblivious to the demands of justice, can feel when money is slipping from their pockets.”

Frances Harper, USA

“He who starts behind in the great race of life must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.”

“How can I get justice from a judge who honestly does not know that he is prejudiced?”

Dick Gregory, USA

“When the government, by public policy, kept you out, the government has a responsibility, by public policy, to bring you in. And it needs to be just as intentional about including you as it was about excluding you.”

Joseph Lowery, USA

“Our struggle is for respect and dignity.”

Mãe Stella de Oxóss, Brazil

“Our future depends on the fight we undertake today.”

Benedita da Silva, Brazil

“The fight for equality is continuous; one must never give up.”

Marielle Franco, Brazil

“Democracy takes place when the silenced find a voice and when we begin to listen to what they have to say.”

Lani Guinier, USA

“Being Black is to resist daily all forms of oppression.”

Silvio Almeida, Brazil

“The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind.”

Martin Luther King, USA

“Never acquire a lifestyle you’re willing to sell your soul to keep.”

Johnnetta Cole, USA

“It’s easy to be independent when you’ve got money. But to be independent when you haven’t got a thing, that’s the Lord’s test.”

Mahalia Jackson, USA

“Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth.”

Dick Gregory, USA

“It’s time for black people to stop playing the separating game of geography, of where the slave ship put us down. We must concentrate on where the slave ship picked us up.”

John Henrik Clarke, USA

“This is what a Negro American revolution will be: A revolution by a racial minority for the enforcement of the democratic laws already in existence.”

Chester Himes, USA

“There are no warlike people – just warlike leaders.”

Ralph Bunche, USA

“A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.”

A. Philip Randolph, USA

“As the agitation which culminated in the abolition of African slavery — in this country covered a period of fifty years, so may we expect that before the rights conferred upon us by the war amendments are fully conceded, a full century will have passed away…. We have undertaken a serious work which will tax and exhaust the best intelligence and energy of the race for the next century.”

Timothy Thomas Fortune, USA

“The appeal to the white man’s pocket has ever been more effectual than all the appeals ever made to his conscience.”

Ida B. Wells, USA

“He who starts behind in the great race of life must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.”

Benjamin Mays, USA

“Every step and the way you take it here on enemy ground is a lesson.”

John Edgar Wideman

“I do not expect the white media to create positive black male images.”

Huey Newton, USA

“Jails and prisons are designed to break human beings, to convert the population into specimens in a zoo –obedient to our keepers, but dangerous to each other.”

Angela Davis, USA

“Racism is so universal in this country, so widespread, and deep-seated, that it is invisible because it is so normal.”

Shirley Chisholm, USA

“Black people know what white people mean when they say law and order.”

Fannie Lou Hamer, USA

“What, to the American slave, is your Fourth of July? I answer: a day that reveals to him, more than all other days of the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him your celebration is a sham … a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages.”

Frederick Douglass, USA

“Racism is a contempt for life, an arrogant assertion that one race is the center of value and object of devotion, before which other races must kneel in submission.”

Martin Luther King, , USA

“The [ruling principle] of …political parties, like all other organisms, is self-preservation. [They seek] the greatest gain for the least effort.”

A. Philip Randolph, USA

“American violence is public life, it’s a public way of life.”

Chester Himes, USA

“Sad to say, Jefferson is not the only American statesman who has spoken high-sounding words in favour of freedom and then left his own children to die slaves.”

William Wells Brown, USA

“We misunderstand racism completely if we do not understand that racism is a mask for a much deeper problem involving not the victims of racism but the perpetrators.”

Lerone Bennet, USA

“Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.”

Martin Luther King, USA

“The sleepless agent of colonization … has penetrated the utmost bounds of the globe. It has wrenched from the weak their fertile valleys and luxuriant hillsides, and when they protested, when they resisted, it has enslaved them or cut their throats.”

Timothy Thomas Fortune, USA

“Hatred, which could destroy so much, never failed to destroy the man who hated.”

James Baldwin, USA

“Liberalism seems to be related to the distance people are from the problem.”

Whitney Young, Jr, USA

“America is the world’s greatest jailer, and we all in jails. Black spirits contained like magnificent birds of wonder.”

Larry Neal, USA

“The media’s the most powerful entity on earth…. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”

Malcolm X, USA

“The world is a severe schoolmaster, for its frowns are less dang’rous than its smiles and flatteries and it is a difficult task to keep in the path of Wisdom.”

Phillis Wheatley, USA

“This is the red man’s country by natural right, and the black man’s country by virtue of his suffering toil.”

Robert Purvis, USA

“When you’re poor, you grow up fast.”

Billie Holiday, USA

“In Africa one day, while sitting with some Africans, I saw a white person and I was so secure. For the first time in my life, I felt no fear and knew exactly why. I was in a sea of security. There was nothing—absolutely nothing he could do to me.”

John Henrik Clarke, USA

“I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired.”

Fannie Lou Hamer, USA

“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.”

Martin Luther King, USA

“I crossed the line [from slavery to freedom] … but [no one welcomed me]…[I] was a stranger in a strange land.”

Harriet Tubman, USA

“In the West they have watches, but we have the time.”

Unknown, African

“Being Black in Brazil is a political act of resistance.”

Lázaro Ramos, Brazil

“A riot is at bottom the language of the unheard.”

Martin Luther King,, USA

“A child cannot be taught by someone who despises him.”

James Baldwin, USA

“I never believed in Santa Claus because I knew no white dude would come into my neighborhood after dark.”

Dick Gregory, USA

“When a white boy undertakes a task, it is taken for granted that he will succeed. On the other hand, people are usually surprised if the Negro boy does not fail. In a word, the Negro youth starts out with the presumption against him.”

Booker T. Washington, USA

“It’s a spiritually impoverished nation that permits infants and children to be the poorest Americans.”

Marian Wright Edelman, USA

“School dropouts are living critics of their environment, of our society, and of our educational system.”

Ralph Ellison, USA

“We used to root for the Indians against the cavalry, because we didn’t think it was fair in the history books that when the cavalry won it was a great victory, and when the Indians won it was a massacre.”

Dick Gregory, USA

“Violence is black children going to school for twelve years and receiving six years’ worth of education.”

Julian Bond, USA

“Negro writer[s] must create in [their] readers’ minds a relationship between a Negro woman hoeing cotton in the South and the men who loll in swivel chairs in Wall Street and take the fruits of her toil.”

Richard Wright, USA

“America as a nation is both racist and antifeminist.”

Shirley Chisholm, USA

“Sexism has diminished the power of all black liberation struggles — reformist or revolutionary.”

Bell Hooks, USA

“Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women. [If she is beautiful that] …will prove her greatest curse. [What] commands admiration in the white woman only hastens the degradation of the female slave.”

Harriet Ann Jacobs, USA

“America’s greatest crime against the black man was not slavery or lynchings, but that he was taught to wear a mask of self-hate and self-doubt.”

Malcolm X, USA

“[My grandmother] was born in slavery and had memories of it and they didn’t sound anything like Gone with the Wind.”

Lorraine Hansberry, USA

“In the South, they don’t care how close you get, as long as you don’t get too big. In the North, they don’t care how big you get, as long as you don’t get too close.”

Unknown, African American

“Color is not a human or personal reality; it is a political reality.”

James Baldwin, USA

“When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.”

Shirley Chisholm, USA

“What the people want is very simple. They want an America as good as its promise.”

Barbara Jordan

“History tells us a nation can survive for years by shifting the burdens of life to the people confined by force and violence to the bottom.”

Lerone Bennet, USA

“He who starts behind in the great race of life must forever remain behind or run faster than the man in front.”

“Ours is a morbid history; most try to evade it. Black people don’t want to remember being victims of lynching, rape, the separation of families, living under Jim Crow and all the other horrors those things entailed. And white folk don’t want to remember being the perpetrators of that kind of persecution.”

John Singleton, USA

“The enemy of a chief is he who has grown up with him from childhood.”

Unknown, Ashanti

“When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.”

Jimi Hendrix, USA

“[In our current system, money] will determine whether the accused goes to prison or walks out of the courtroom a free man…..[But it shouldn’t be ] about money, [it should be]about using the law as a device for change.”

Johnnie Cochran, USA

“No one can say that Christianity has failed. It has never been tried.”

Adam Clayton Powell, USA

“The devil was created by fourth century Christian writers. You don’t find the devil in any African system I know of….”

Ishmael Reed, USA

Acknowledgements

Copyright, Jonathan McDougall 2024

Thanks to Oluwatobi Ajimoko, Kristen Cain, and Kendra Johnson for assistance in compilation and editing, to Ariane Barboza for Brazilian proverbs, and to Liana Alston for editorial suggestions.

Biblography

Joselyn Pine, Book of African-American Quotations (2010)
Gerd de Ley, The Book of African Proverbs (2019)
Maryn Liles, 150 of the Best African Proverbs About Life, Love and Family That Are Full of Poetic Wisdom, Parade (Feb 1, 2023)
African Proverbs, No Sweat Shakespeare (last accessed February 14, 2024)

African Manners
The Wisdom of African Proverbs-Get Inspired From 300 African Proverbs From All Around the Continent, Safari Junkie (last accessed Feb 14, 2024
Quora
Reginald McKnight, African American Wisdom (1994)

Vivien Morris-Brown, The Jamaica Handbook of Proverbs (1993)

Copyright © 2026 Afrodescendant - Griots Wisdom

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