Civil Rights Activists

"I knew well that the only way I could get that door open was to knock it down; because I knocked all of them down. Don't let anything stop you"

"If I would tell you my medical history, you would agree with me that I was destined to live for some years."

"Our interest in better race relations had naturally come as a result of our experiences and our desire to see that this doesn’t continue to happen"

"Work hard and prepare perfectly for every case and devote yourself to further causes which advance improvement of all phases of the human condition and spirit."

"Racism is a grown-up disease, and we must stop using our children to spread it."

"You cannot look at a person and tell whether they're good or bad."

"Good and evil comes in all shades and colors... evil is not prejudiced.... evil just needs an opportunity to work through you.... All of us, no matter what we look like, we all have a common enemy, and that is evil. If we don't understand that and come together, then evil will win."

"The theme would be a good opportunity for Prince George's County to come together as a county to do something in remembrance of that time and celebrate that period."

"by the time you are 70, you should have gained some wisdom to share with someone else. That you’ve had some experiences that you carry within you, within your body, within your presence. Wisdom to share with other people. And that is what the book is doing"

"It didn't matter if race was in it, I was for women, because I noticed there was a gap and I thought that we needed more women in politics."

"If you got an egg thrown at you, so what? If a brick was thrown at you, you tried to dodge it."

"I didn't take any of that [criticism] personally…I think if people want to think that, they can think that, but people who know me and know me well, know that I've always been very independent. I think for myself, and I'm capable of doing it and enjoy doing that"

"to develop ‘strategies and policies for creating strong fathers."

"re-ignite a spark in the community by motivating our youth to empower themselves in their communication, presentation, leadership and workshop development skills."

"One of the hardest things in life is having words in your heart that you can't utter."

"I have never traveled to anyone else's drumbeat. Some people have called me a rebel. I qualify as one. A lot of it is inadvertent, unintentional, not a gesture at all, just me, just the nature of myself, finding my own drumbeat."

"When I read great literature, great drama, speeches, or sermons, I feel that the human mind has not achieved anything greater than the ability to share feelings and thoughts through language."

"If you live in an oppressive society, you've got to be resilient. You can't let each little thing crush you. You have take every encounter and make yourself larger, rather than allow yourself to be diminished by it."

"The myth of Minnesota liberalism made the reality of rigid segregation in the city all the more unbearable, but since they knew very little of the fight for freedom raging through China, India, the East Indies, Indochina and the Philippines, they could only imagine a fight within the system."

"Between June 1945 and September 1946, fifty-six African American veterans were lynched. The actual death toll was far greater. The Klan, as part of and in league with the police, had developed a terrible new weapon. Outspoken Blacks simply disappeared."

"Her passion and wrath was not scattergun – it had a laser-like focus on calling out inequality and injustice. She suffered no fools but had a kindness and warmth for many."

"As one of the women who took the train in 1971, she set in train an unstoppable wave for equality and a changing of Ireland for the better. That change has not yet reached its conclusion but it would be nowhere if it wasn't for warriors like Nell. In an Ireland trying to emerge from the shadows and find who it was, Nell McCafferty was one of the people who knew exactly who she was and wasn't afraid to enter every battle for gay and women's rights. We all owe her a great debt for this. Nell McCafferty left Ireland a much better place than she found it and she played her part with spirit and style."

"We were touching a raw nerve. Women in Ireland wanted contraception. I mean, six children on average. Or maybe more."

"It was massive that the crowd agreed with us because it was against the church. You just knew it resonated with women who thought "I needn’t get pregnant"."

"It was never a condom train. We were never going to give control of our sexuality to men."

"You don't know me, but you've been inside me, and that's why we're here today."

"It took me a long time to learn healing is not about advancing. It is about returning repeatedly to forage something."

"If men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament."

"We need men and women from every corner of the country bound by a common objective to create a Nigeria which works for every Nigerian."

"“I believe there will be respect for human life, less nepotism, tribalism, religious fanaticism, insensitivity and outright disregard for the wishes of the Nigerian people."

"If it is APC, never; I'm not going to work with them. Forget it. However, if it is PDP, AAC or absolutely any of the other parties, I'm willing to go in there and see what I can do to help us create a better Nigeria."

"We must learn to state our opinions clearly, & stand by them no matter whose oxes are gored! How else do you assure the electorates that your word is your bond?!"

"We have to start making the men, women, children, the imams, the pastors and priests etc... understand that men and women are equal in the eyes of God. That is a challenge that I will have to deal with -- in terms of getting the average Nigerian to cast their vote for me."

"Men and women who rule us are greedy with an overwhelming degree of selfishness. They go into government simply to chop their portion of the national cake. They are into government to pay lip-service to the manifestos they give the electorate to get them voted into power."

"I am a lawyer with vast experience in legislative drafting and policy implementation. I am also a people organizer with experience leading political groups, one of which includes the formation and leadership of the now defunct political party, National Interest Party (NIP), the party upon which I stood to run for the office of President in 2019. All of these are factors I feel make me a great candidate for the position I seek."

"To me, we need contributions & views from all sides (masculine & feminine) in designing the future Nigeria."

"There are 84 million registered voters in Nigeria. 60% of them are under 30 and they don't have these biases that you're thinking. They're young and that's my power base.Those are the people that are taking me to the presidency."

"During the 1870s, Black political participation was the primary motivation for White supremacist violence. Black political participation accounted for 83 percent of the recorded mob violence of the period. The federal government allowed its southern adversaries back into the union through the violence, terror, and disenfranchisement of people of African descent. The U.S. government and national Republican Party proved unreliable allies as valiant men like Caldwell were assassinated, Black political officials were deposed, and the Black masses were forced into agrarian peonage. With the Hayes-Tilden , any pretense of federal intervention in Mississippi and the former Confederacy was dropped for decades. A war was waged in the South to place emancipated Blacks, in the words of Du Bois, "back towards slavery." Terrorist violence was unleashed to secure the White planter elite in power and to perpetuate a system based on White supremacy. The specter of violence remained as a means of intimidation and social control. In the decades following Reconstruction, lynching became common in the state. Between 1882 and 1940, 534 Black people were lynched in Mississippi—the highest total in the United States during that period. The federal government ignored terrorism waged against Black people: "Congress and the president took no action to prevent lynching, and the federal government did not prosecute the perpetrators, even when the event was publicized at least a day in advance." With White supremacist violence as a major vehicle used to intimidate and suppress, within decades Blacks were excluded from representation and participation in electoral politics and apartheid was institutionalized in civil society."

"The assassination of Caldwell is symbolic of the reign of terror that defeated Reconstruction, democracy, Black political participation, as well as human rights in Mississippi and the South in the mid-. Violence was central to the establishment of White domination, not only to seize power for White supremacists but also to instill fear and intimidation in the Black population and their allies. In a state with a Black majority, to secure White supremacy and to maintain Black labor, particularly rural workers, as a servile labor force, it was necessary to institutionalize fear and intimidation. Men like Caldwell represented hope for Black progress and resistance to White domination."

"Another Belzoni activist would be attacked by White supremacists months later. Belzoni leader, entrepreneur, and grocer Gus Courts was warned after the murder of Lee that he would be "next on the list to go." Courts was distinguished from his peers by organizing a contingent. of Humphreys County Blacks to pay their poll taxes and register to vote in 1953. After being harassed by the Humphreys County Citizens' Council, Courts appealed to the state government for protection. Instead of receiving protection, Courts was confronted in his store by a local Citizens' Council member who possessed a copy of his letter appealing for protection. After the November 1955 elections, Courts was shot in his store. Friends took the wounded Courts two counties away to the hospital in Mound Bayou, due to concerns about the care Lee received in the Belzoni hospital after his assault. Courts recovered from the attack in Mound Bayou. Following advice from Medgar Evers, Courts decided to leave the state. Escorted by an armed Evers, Courts fled the Delta to Jackson. After stints in Texas and California, Courts and his family would eventually move to Chicago. An FBI investigation of the Courts shooting ended with no arrests. In Chicago, Courts was clearly a political exile of Mississippi apartheid. During a 1968 interview, Courts reflected, I had to leave my $15,000 a year grocery business, my trucking business and my home and everything—my wife and I—thousands of us Mississippians had to run away. We had to flee in the night. We are American refugees from the terror in the South all because we wanted to vote."

"Another Belzoni activist would be attacked by White supremacists months later. Belzoni leader, entrepreneur, and grocer Gus Courts was warned after the murder of Lee that he would be "next on the list to go." Courts was distinguished from his peers by organizing a contingent. of Humphreys County Blacks to pay their poll taxes and register to vote in 1953. After being harassed by the Humphreys County Citizens' Council, Courts appealed to the state government for protection. Instead of receiving protection, Courts was confronted in his store by a local Citizens' Council member who possessed a copy of his letter appealing for protection. After the November 1955 elections, Courts was shot in his store. Friends took the wounded Courts two counties away to the hospital in Mound Bayou, due to concerns about the care Lee received in the Belzoni hospital after his assault. Courts recovered from the attack in Mound Bayou. Following advice from Medgar Evers, Courts decided to leave the state. Escorted by an armed Evers, Courts fled the Delta to Jackson. After stints in Texas and California, Courts and his family would eventually move to Chicago. An FBI investigation of the Courts shooting ended with no arrests. In Chicago, Courts was clearly a political exile of Mississippi apartheid. During a 1968 interview, Courts reflected, I had to leave my $15,000 a year grocery business, my trucking business and my home and everything—my wife and I—thousands of us Mississippians had to run away. We had to flee in the night. We are American refugees from the terror in the South all because we wanted to vote."

"One particularly poignant aspect of the debate within the American CP's National Committee was that it pitted Bettina Aptheker, who denounced the invasion, against her own father, Herbert Aptheker. Bettina was one of the liveliest of the young people who rose to prominence in the Party in the 1960s, and also one of the warmest human beings I've ever met. She adored her father, so it could not have been easy for her to oppose him that day."

"History does not repeat itself, but our reading of history shapes our perception of the world and our vision of how to change it. With the collective rendering of woman's legacy still to come, we will reckon a course that transforms our reading of the human experience and allows us to navigate through hitherto unknown waters. (p 151)"

"women did not have such exciting lives in the Sixties. A man had a much more dramatic life. I think about the literary scene in the Sixties when I was writing, also, in Berkeley. You'd go to a party, and what I'd love about the party is that the poets would get up and read, would entertain one another with poetry-but it was always the guys that would get up and read, and the girls were always in the back listening to the poems. And so to write about that time, even during the times of the demonstrations, the men had all the exciting jobs. Even Bettina Aptheker complains about having to run the mimeograph machine. And then also, men had a more dangerous life, too, because they had the draft. They were always susceptible to having to go to Vietnam. So there's that dramatic story that they had that the women did not have."

"I find myself again cut off, babbling "buts." I find myself then, also, drawn to Catharine MacKinnon's eloquent "discourses on life and law," in which she argues that viewing gender as a matter of sameness and difference covers up the reality of gender as a system of power, hierarchy, and privilege, of imposed inequality. The point is that more than one thing is true for us at the same time. A masculinist process, however, at least as it has been institutionalized in Western society, accentuates the combative, the oppositional, the either/or dichotomies, the "right" and the "wrong." What I have been about throughout this book is showing that the dailiness of women's lives structures a different way of knowing and a different way of thinking. The process that comes from this way of knowing has to be at the center of a women's politics, and it has to be at the center of a women's scholarship. This is why I have been drawn to the poetry and to the stories: because they are layered, because more than one truth is represented, because there is ambiguity and paradox. When we work together in coalitions, or on the job, or in academic settings, or in the community, we have to allow for this ambiguity and paradox, respect each other, our cultures, our integrity, our dignity. As we have pressured against racial and sex discrimination, institutional doors have been opened, however tenuously and with whatever reluctance. Some of us have been allowed in, but nothing about the values of those institutions or their rules of success has changed, whether they be academic, corporate, ecclesiastic, political, medical, or juridical. The point is to change the values and the rules and to change the process by which they are established and enforced. The point is to integrate ideas about love and healing, about balance and connection, about beauty and growing, into our everyday ways of being. We have to believe in the value of our own experiences and in the value of our ways of knowing, our ways of doing things. We have to wrap ourselves in these ways of knowing, to enact daily ceremonies of life. (p 253-4)"

"We have to stop thinking in oppositional categories. We have to stop thinking that one line is "correct" and that others must be "won over" to it, while those who disagree are "defeated." (p 252)"

"The desert is a metaphor. For how long women have endured. Like creosote. Waiting for the rains. We are the rains. (p 254)"

"(What do you wish you could tell yourself at the time? Girls your age now?) BA: I wish that I could have taken a class like what I teach. I wish feminist studies and women’s studies classes were offered [when I was in college]. [At my age,] You knew how you felt but you didn’t know what to do about it. I knew I was a lesbian [but] I didn’t have the language for it. There were lesbians in the Communist party, [but] the party was very homophobic. Some of [the lesbians] were living together openly but never talking about it. It was don’t ask, don’t tell."

"The formation of a lesbian (and gay) identity, divested of Freudian origin, is in process. (p 119)"

"It was my experience in the Angela Davis trial that propelled me into a study of Afro-American women's history and, ultimately, into women's studies."