- "I am America. I am the part you won't recognize. But get used to me. Black, confident, cocky; my name, not yours; my religion, not yours; my goals, my own; get used to me."
-- Muhammad Ali The Greatest (1975) - "Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise."
-- Maya Angelou "Still I rise," And Still I Rise (1978) - "Racism is not an excuse to not do the best you can."
-- Arthur Ashe quoted in Sports Illustrated - "Just like you can buy grades of silk, you can buy grades of justice. "
-- Ray Charles - "The past is a ghost, the future a dream. All we ever have is now. "
-- Bill Cosby - "There is no negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution..."
-- Frederick Douglass - "You can be up to your boobies in white satin, with gardenias in your hair and no sugar cane for miles, but you can still be working on a plantation."
-- Billie Holiday - "Greatness occurs when your children love you, when your critics respect you and when you have peace of mind. "
-- Quincy Jones - " Do not call for black power or green power. Call for brain power."
-- Barbara Jordan - "Almost always, the creative dedicated minority has made the world better."
-- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. - "The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself—the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us—that's where it's at."
-- Jesse Owens, Blackthink (1970) - "I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminshes fear."
-- Rosa Parks - "Have a vision. Be demanding. "
-- Colin Powell - "Be black, shine, aim high. "
-- Leontyne Price - "God gives nothing to those who keep their arms crossed. "
-- African Proverb - "Freedom is never given; it is won."
-- A. Philip Randolph in keynote speech given at the Second National Negro Congress in 1937 - "When I found I had crossed that line, [on her first escape from slavery, 1845] I looked at my hands to see if I was the same person. There was such a glory over everything."
-- Harriet Tubman - "Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed."
-- Booker T. Washington - "Black people have always been America's wilderness in search of a promised land."
-- Cornel West, Race Matters - "We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice."
-- Carter Woodson on founding Negro History Week, 1926
The article Top 20 Black History Month Quotations was Submitted by Danielle Hollister through Articles.GetACoder.com network. Here's the additional information: Resource Box - © Danielle 
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