Women Activists From The United States

"“As Black women, we’re always given these seemingly devastating experiences—experiences that could absolutely break us. But what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly. What we do as Black women is take the worst situations and create from that point.”"

"“But what the caterpillar calls the end of the world, the master calls the butterfly. What we do as Black women are to take the worst situations and create from that point.”"

"Memories are immortal. They’re deathless and precise. They have the power of giving you joy and perspective in hard times. Or, they can strangle you. Define you in a way that’s based more in other people’s tucked-up perceptions than truth."

"…I know Jim Crow, I understand that time period. It’s a 100-year time period that was rife with lots of violence and anger, and people with lost dreams and hopes. I wanted the frustration and that anger to be more palpable."

"…My definition of success is legacy, is significance. And also, might I add, my authenticity is my rebellion. It's my F.U., per se. It helps when I think of it like that. That's why I give these speeches; that's why I say what I say. And it's also my narcissism, because I feel that that's probably what sets me apart from most people. But all those things are in my idea of success. If I can go to my grave feeling like — you know, it's like Lorraine Toussaint said. She said the reason why she adopted her child is because she didn't want "series regular" to be on her tombstone. And yeah, I want something quite beautiful, like Shirley Chisholm — you know, on her tombstone is "Unbought and Unbossed.""

"Do not live someone else's life and someone else's idea of what womanhood is. Womanhood is you. Womanhood is everything that's inside of you."

"Working hard is great when it’s motivated by passion and love and enthusiasm. But working hard when it’s motivated by deprivation is not pleasant."

"“At the end of the day, nobody can tell you how to tackle failure or how to handle change. The world is very good at encouraging you to go along with the status quo and at basking in your successes.”"

"It’s only been recently that I can admit that I would jump in trash bins looking for food and I would steal from the corner store because I was hungry. I would fall asleep in school on a daily basis because we had nothing."

"Artists and actors of color have to alter and water ourselves down for Hollywood, but I refuse to be pacified."

"I always say that one thing missing in cinema is that regular black woman…Not anyone didactic, or whose sole purpose in the narrative is to illustrate some social abnormality. There’s no meaning behind it, other than she is just there…I would love to have a black female Klute, or Kramer, or Unmarried Woman, or Annie Hall. But who’s gonna write it, who’s gonna produce it, who’s gonna see it, again and again and again?"

"I was trying to fit in, stifling my voice, stifling who I was, in order to be seen as pretty, in order for people to like me. And then going home, not being able to sleep and having anxiety. I have found that the labelling of me, and having to fit into that box, has cost me a great deal. I’ve had a lot of lost years."

"May 15th-19th has been designated “National Infrastructure Week” by the US Chambers of Commerce, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)... Their message: “It’s time to rebuild.” Ever since ASCE began issuing its “National Infrastructure Report Card” in 1998, the nation has gotten a dismal grade of D or D+. In the meantime, the estimated cost of fixing its infrastructure has gone up from $1.3 trillion to $4.6 trillion. While American politicians debate endlessly over how to finance the needed fixes and which ones to implement, the Chinese have managed to fund massive infrastructure projects all across their country, including 12,000 miles of high-speed rail built just in the last decade... A key difference between China and the US is that the Chinese government owns the majority of its banks... The US government could do that too, without raising taxes, slashing services, cutting pensions, or privatizing industries.... The federal government could set up a bank on a similar model. It has massive revenues, which it could leverage into credit for its own purposes. Since financing is typically about 50 percent of the cost of infrastructure, the government could cut infrastructure costs in half by borrowing from its own bank. Public-private partnerships are a good deal for investors but a bad deal for the public. The federal government can generate its own credit without private financial middlemen. That is how China does it, and we can to."

"Funding through the Federal Reserve may be controversial, but establishing a national public infrastructure and development bank should be a no-brainer. The real question is why we don’t already have one, like China, Germany, and other countries that are running circles around us in infrastructure development. Many European, Asian and Latin American countries have their own national development banks, as well as belonging to bilateral or multinational development institutions that are jointly owned by multiple governments. Unlike the US Federal Reserve, which considers itself “independent” of government, national development banks are wholly owned by their governments and carry out public development policies. The most profitable and efficient way for national and local governments to finance public infrastructure and development is with their own banks, as the impressive track records of KfW and other national development banks have shown... We need to resurrect that public funding engine today, not only to address the national and global crises we are facing now but for the ongoing development the country needs in order to manifest its true potential."

"Of the 3,000 emails released from Hillary Clinton’s private email server in late December 2015, about a third were from her close confidante Sidney Blumenthal, the attorney who defended her husband in the Monica Lewinsky case. One of these emails, dated April 2, 2011, reads in part: Qaddafi’s government holds 143 tons of gold, and a similar amount in silver . . . . This gold was accumulated prior to the current rebellion and was intended to be used to establish a pan-African currency based on the Libyan golden Dinar. This plan was designed to provide the Francophone African Countries with an alternative to the French franc (CFA). In a “source comment,” the original declassified email adds: According to knowledgeable individuals this quantity of gold and silver is valued at more than $7 billion... Conspicuously absent is any mention of humanitarian concerns. The objectives are money, power and oil."

"Money might... indeed become a servant of humanity, transformed from a tool of oppression into a means of securing common prosperity. But first the central bank needs to become a public servant. It needs to be made a public utility, responsive to the needs of the people and the economy."

"The money issued by governments to finance public projects has a long and successful history dating back at least to the beginning of the 18th century, when the American colony of Pennsylvania issued a currency that was both lent and spent by the government local in the local economy. The result was a period of unprecedented prosperity achieved without inflation or taxes."

"As alarm bells sound over the advancing destruction of the environment, a variety of Green New Deall proposals have appeared in the US and Europe, along with some interesting academic debates about how to fund them. Monetary policy, normally relegated to obscure academic tomes and bureaucratic meetings behind closed doors, has suddenly taken center stage... Public development banks already have a successful track record in Europe, and their debts are not considered debts of the government. They are financed not through taxes but by the borrowers when they repay the loans. Like other banks, development banks are moneymaking institutions that not only don’t cost the government money but actually generate a profit for it."

"The brief visit of then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to Libya in October 2011 was referred to by the media as a “victory lap.” “We came, we saw, he died!” she crowed in a CBS video interview on hearing of the capture and brutal murder of Libyan leader Muammar el-Qaddafi.... US-NATO intervention was allegedly undertaken on humanitarian grounds, after reports of mass atrocities; but human rights organizations questioned the claims after finding a lack of evidence.... Before 2011, Libya had achieved economic independence, with its own water, its own food, its own oil, its own money, and its own state-owned bank. It had arisen under Qaddafi from one of the poorest of countries to the richest in Africa. Education and medical treatment were free; having a home was considered a human right; and Libyans participated in an original system of local democracy. The country boasted the world’s largest irrigation system, the Great Man-made River project, which brought water from the desert to the cities and coastal areas; and Qaddafi was embarking on a program to spread this model throughout Africa. But that was before US-NATO forces bombed the irrigation system and wreaked havoc on the country."

"You are not weak. You are brave. One of the bravest I know. Speaking your truth, a person living at the intersection of multiple identities, unapologetically, takes courage. I love you"

"Survivors, I believe you. Because I am you. #BelieveSurivors #StopKavanaugh #timesup ✊🏽✊🏽✊🏽"

"(Ella Baker) is more responsible than any other single individual for the birth of the new abolitionists as an organized group, and who remains the most tireless, the most modest, and the wisest activist I know in the struggle for human rights today."

"Then Ella Baker spoke, holding before the crowd, as she did so often, a vision beyond the immediate: "Even if segregation is gone, we will still need to be free; we will still have to see that everyone has a job. Even if we can all vote, but if people are still hungry, we will not be free.... Singing alone is not enough; we need schools and learning.... Remember, we are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit, a larger freedom that encompasses all mankind.""

"women played a crucial role in those early dangerous years of organizing in the South, and were looked on with admiration. Many of these were older women like Ella Baker, and Amelia Boynton in Selma, Alabama, and "Mama Dolly" in Albany, Georgia."

"The complexity of it all is perhaps revealed in a brief exchange which took place at a SNCC meeting between James Baldwin and Ella Baker. Someone had asked Baldwin about the role of whites in the movement. He replied, "A white man is a white man only if he says he is-but you haven't got to be white." Then Ella Baker added, "The place of the Negro is not as a Negro, but as a human being." And Baldwin said, "That's right." Later, Ella Baker returned to that idea and, noting Baldwin's exhortation that whites coming into the movement should forget they're white, said, "We too must forget we're Negro." Responding to what she detected as a rising mood of something akin to black nationalism among some SNCC workers, she said: "I can understand that as we grow in our own strength and as we flex our muscles of leadership... we can begin to feel that the other fellow should come through us. But this is not the way to create a new world.... We need to penetrate the mystery of life and perfect the mastery of life, and the latter requires understanding that human beings are human beings.""

"The laudable move away from lavishing attention solely on charismatic leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. to giving credit to behind-the-scenes Black women catalysts like Ella Baker has created more space for examining the contributions of Black and white women on the ground."

"In 1969, Ella Baker, SNCC’s great mentor, pointed us in the direction of meaningful action when she said, “In order for us as poor and oppressed people to become a part of a society that is meaningful, the system under which we now exist has to be radically changed.” This means that we are going to have to learn to think in radical terms. I use the term radical in its original meaning – getting down to and understanding the root cause. Baker continued, “It means facing a system that does not lend itself to your needs and devising means by which you change that system.”"

"In the present era of devalued dreams and mocked hopes, we need to confront immoral power with moral power. That was the message of SNCC founder Ella Baker and the essence of the 1960s movements."

"what happened, I think, was Ella Baker was really sort of the godmother for SNCC. I met Ella in the summer of 1960. And in the spring of 1960, she had taken the initiative to get the student sit-in energy at Shaw, her alma mater, and held off on the big civil rights leaders, to say, “Look, the kids ought to have the opportunity to manage their own insurgency,” right? And so, SNCC was the encapsulation of the sit-in movement, the energy of the sit-in movement, right? And so, that — and SNCC took that energy into the Freedom Rides, because it was the SNCC energy which said to the president of the United States and the attorney general, “It doesn’t matter what you’re saying, that, you know, there’s some danger here. Our lives are in danger, but we’ve decided that, with our lives, this is what we want to do.” Right? And so, SNCC, really, and those students became the example for students all over the country — right? — the idea that students should draw a line in the sand and say, “Look, that’s it. That’s enough. We don’t want to live in this country unless we can change it.”"

"It's like, why? You're going to burn out. It's not humanly possible for you to just be your Lone Ranger self out there in the world. Ella Baker's question, "Who are your people?" when she would meet you is so important. Who are you accountable to in this world? Because that will tell me a lot about who you are."

"I idolize Fannie Lou Hamer and Ella Baker. And they are supreme examples of what being freedom fighters, principled, fearless — or at least courageous. There’s a difference between being fearless and being courageous. Courageous is actually better, because everyone should have some fear about what might actually harm them...Ella Baker, of course, she was a person — among so many other things, she worked for all of the major civil rights organizations at some time. So she had experience across organizations. She also was doing that grassroots, very, very dangerous organizing in the Jim Crow South, in little towns, in rural areas. But she is probably best known for the person who inspired and made possible the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which is SNCC."

"I have always thought what is needed is the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people."

"Every time I see a young person who has come through the system to a stage where he could profit from the system and identify with it, but who identifies more with the struggle of black people who have not had his chance, every time I find such a person I take new hope. I feel a new life as a result of"

"one of the greatest radical Democrats in the twentieth century."

"as activist historian Barbara Ransby has emphasized, we cannot romanticize leaderlessness. She recently pointed out that: "Those who romanticize the concept of leaderless movements often misleadingly deploy Ella Baker's words, "Strong people don't need [a] strong leader." Baker delivered this message in various iterations over her fifty-year career working in the trenches of racial-justice struggles, but what she meant was specific and contextual. She was calling for people to disinvest from the notion of the messianic, charismatic leader who promises political salvation in exchange for deference. Baker also did not mean that movements would naturally emerge without collective analysis, serious strategizing, organizing, mobilizing and consensus building.""

"I have always felt it was a handicap for oppressed peoples to depend so largely upon a leader, because unfortunately in our culture, the charismatic leader usually becomes a leader because he has found a spot in the public limelight. It usually means he has been touted through the public media, which means that the media made him, and the media may undo him. There is also the danger in our culture that, because a person is called upon to give public statements and is acclaimed by the establishment, such a person gets to the point of believing that he is the movement. Such people get so involved with playing the game of being important that they exhaust themselves and their time, and they don't do the work of actually organizing people."

"The movement of the '50's and '60's was carried largely by women, since it came out of church groups. It was sort of second nature to women to play a supportive role. How many made a conscious decision on the basis of the larger goals, how many on the basis of habit pattern, I don't know. But it's true that the number of women who carried the movement is much larger than that of men. Black women have had to carry this role, and I think the younger women are insisting on an equal footing."

"after SNCC came into existence, of course, it opened up a new era of struggle."

"From the standpoint of the historical pattern of the society, which seems to assume that this (supporting roles) is the best role for women, I think that certainly the young people who are challenging this ought to be challenging it, and it ought to be changed."

"I think you have to have a certain sense of your own value, and a sense of security on your part, to be able to forgo the glamor of what the leadership role offers."

"The practical and philosophical contribution of Ella Baker to SNCC, the southern civil rights movement, and the entire student movement cannot be overestimated. Baker asserted that what the movement needed was "the development of people who are interested not in being leaders as much as in developing leadership among other people." Baker nurtured this potential in the Black southern student movement. SNCC was created as a coordinating body to bring together and maximize the effectiveness of the local student movements. Baker, then fifty-six years old and increasingly frustrated with the hierarchical style of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which she had helped develop, challenged the students to consider the strategic question "[w]here do we go from here?""

"to me, when people themselves know what they are looking for and recognize that they can exercise some influence by action, that's progress."

"Black people who were living in the South were constantly living with violence. Part of the job was to help them to understand what that violence was and how they in an organized fashion could help to stem it. The major job was getting people to understand that they had something within their power that they could use, and it could only be used if they understood what was happening and how group action could counter violence even when it was perpetrated by the police or, in some instances, the state."

"My basic sense of it has always been to get people to understand that in the long run they themselves are the only protection they have against violence or injustice."

"You would go into areas where people were not yet organized in the NAACP and try to get them more involved. Maybe you would start with some simple thing like the fact that they had no street lights, or the fact that in the given area somebody had been arrested or had been jailed in a manner that was considered illegal and unfair, and the like. You would deal with whatever the local problem was, and on the basis of the needs of the people you would try to organize them in the NAACP."

"People have to be made to understand that they cannot look for salvation anywhere but to themselves."

"You didn't see me on television, you didn't see news stories about me," she told two writers, Ellen Cantarow and Susan Gushee O'Malley. "The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don't need strong leaders."

"In my organizational work, I have never thought in terms of my "making a contribution." I just thought of myself as functioning where there was a need. And if I have made a contribution I think it may be that I had some influence on a large number of people."

"When the 1954 Supreme Court decision on school desegregation came, I was serving as chairman of the Educational Committee of the New York branch. We began to deal with the problems of de facto segregation, and the results of the de facto segregation which were evidenced largely in the achievement levels of black children, going down instead of going up after they entered public school."

"As assistant field secretary of the branches of the NAACP, much of my work was in the South. At that time the NAACP was the leader on the cutting edge of social change. I remember when NAACP membership in the South was the basis for getting beaten up or even killed."