| Black Women's History Quotations |  |
|
To acknowledge our ancestors means
we are aware that we did not make ourselves, that the
line stretches all the way back, perhaps, to God; or to
Gods. We remember them because it is an easy thing to
forget: that we are not the first to suffer, rebel,
fight, love and die. The grace with which we embrace
life, in spite of the pain, the sorrows, is always a
measure of what has gone before. Alice Walker, Revolutionary Petunias, 1970 I'm not living the
blues, I'm just singing for the women who think they
can't speak out. Can't a man alive mistreat me, `cause I
know who I am. They [the
police and bosses] 'fraid of the women. You can out talk
the men. But us women don't take no tea for the fever. To be a
woman of the Negro race in America, and to be able to
grasp the deep significance of the possibilities of the
crisis, is to have a heritage, it seems to me, unique in
the ages. `We the
people'--it is a very eloquent beginning. But when the
Constitution of the United States was completed on the
seventeenth of September in 1787, I was not included in
that `We the people.' I felt for many years that somehow
George Washington and Alexander Hamilton just left me out
by mistake. But through the process of amendment,
interpretation, and court decision, I have finally been
included in `We the People.' |