"I have no creative use for guilt, yours or my own. Guilt is only another way of avoiding informed action, of buying time out of the pressing need to make clear choices, out of the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees. If I speak to you in anger, at least I have spoken to you: I have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in the street; I have not looked at your bleeding sister’s body and asked, “What did she do to deserve it?” This was the reaction of two white women to Mary Church Terrell’s telling of the lynching of a pregnant Black woman whose baby was then torn from her body. That was in 1921, and Alice Paul had just refused to publicly endorse the enforcement of the Nineteenth Amendment for all women — by refusing to endorse the inclusion of women of Color, although we had worked to help bring about that amendment."
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Activists from the United StatesCivil rights activistsNon-fiction authors from the United StatesJournalists from the United StatesAfrican Americans
Original Language: English
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Sources
Audre Lorde, “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism” (1981)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Mary_Church_Terrell
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Mary Church Terrell
Mary Church Terrell (September 23, 1863 – July 24, 1954) was one of the first African-American women to earn a college degree, and became known as a national activist for civil rights and suffrage.
27 quotes on TrueQuotesView all quotes by Mary Church Terrell →
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