20th Century African American Women

"I am sick and tired of being sick and tired."

"With the people, for the people, by the people. I crack up when I hear it; I say, with the handful, for the handful, by the handful, 'cause that's what really happens."

"It is only when we speak what is right that we stand a chance at night of being blown to bits in our homes. Can we call this a free country, when I am afraid to go to sleep in my own home in Mississippi?... I might not live two hours after I get back home, but I want to be a part of setting the Negro free in Mississippi."

"The anger that you see expressed out there in Los Angeles, in my district this evening, is a righteous anger, and it's difficult for me to say to the people, "Don't be angry." When people are angry and enraged, they do do senseless things. They do act even sometimes out of character, and that's why it is the responsibility of America to try and avoid putting people in these kinds of situations."

"Right-wing Republican racists fear black women like Maxine Waters because she takes no shit from bigots like Trump."

"I am extremely angry, and I have no problems with saying that. You know, there comes a time when it’s all right to be angry. That’s how I feel. And I’m sure that the people that you see, no matter what you think about what they’re doing, and no matter how we would not like to see that kind of violence, you can understand the anger."

"I would say that there are a few [black politicians]-like Ron Dellums and Maxine Waters-who are not out for themselves, but for the people. But people shouldn't expect them to accomplish anything progressive without the community demanding it. The election of Maxine Waters to Congress was an important moment in our history. A progressive Black woman, solidly backed by her community, whose record as an elected official in California is strong as it can get. People in South Central Los Angeles can vouch for that. We also need organizers."

"It is not enough to say he was a revered civil rights icon. He was a man of impeccable integrity who dedicated his life to fighting against racism, discrimination & injustice. John was a true leader who inspired us all to have the courage to fight."

"Jussie is my friend - a very talented & beautiful human being. It is so hurtful that homophobic haters would dare hurt someone so loving and giving. I'm dedicated to finding the culprits and bringing them to justice. Jussie did not deserve to be harmed by anyone!"

"Let’s make sure we show up wherever we have to show up,” she said at a rally in Los Angeles on Saturday. “And if you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd. And you push back on them. And you tell them they’re not welcome anymore, anywhere."

"I had a conversation here today with someone asked, ‘Well, what about Pence? If you are able to impeach, Pence will be worse. Well, I said, ‘Look, one at a time. You knock one down, and we’ll be ready for Pence. We’ll get him, too.'"

"And, as you know, there’s a difference in how some of our leadership talk about how we should handle all of this. They say, ‘Maxine, please don’t say impeachment anymore.’ And when they say that, I say impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment, impeachment."

"And I want to tell you, for these members of his Cabinet who remain and try to defend him, they're not going to be able to go to a restaurant, to be able to stop at a gas station, to be able to shop at a department store. The people are going to turn on them, they're going to protest, they're going to absolutely harass them until they tell the president: 'No, I can't hang with you.'** Remarks regarding the illegal immigrant family separation crisis, quoted in The Washington Post (25 June 2018) "‘Be careful what you wish for Max!’: Trump takes aim at Waters after she calls for public harassment of his Cabinet""

"The shouting, the overrunning of the Capitol, the sneaking in of Tea Party participants into the basement of the Capitol, the name-calling, the spitting, all of that…. The Tea Party emerges as not only outrageous, but they have turned up the volume in ways that even Code Pink have not been able to do."

"The president is a liar. Dick Cheney, the chief architect of the Big Lie, is not only a liar, he is a thief."

"I have to march because my mother could not have an abortion."

"We’ve spent $400 billion between Iraq and Afghanistan. That amounts to a couple of billion dollars a week. I stood on the floor of Congress begging, trying to get just one billion to fight HIV and AIDS, to be able to fund all the outreach programs. But we’re at a time when very smart people have been allowing this dumb-ass President of the United States [George W. Bush] to do as he pleases."

"I don't see white police officers slamming the heads of little white boys into police cars."

"Riot is the voice of the unheard."

"If you call it a riot, it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason. I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable. So I call it a rebellion."

"I think we have to say it's okay to be angry. It's not all right to be violent. I know it would make people happy if I said I could wave my hand and make people behave less violently. I am not that presumptuous. We have a moral responsibility to share the resources of this country."

"Many other cities could go the way that Los Angeles went last night unless the president is willing to step in and take some strong action in terms of letting people know that he cares about this issue."

"I am completely opposed to increasing the debt ceiling without basic tax reform. What we need in this country today is leadership which has the courage to call for income tax reform to put the burden where it must be placed, on those who can afford to pay."

"She was our Moses that opened the Red Sea for us,""

"I don’t bend, that I come from the Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm school of Democrats, and that is unbought and unbossed."

"Our Lady of Food Justice & SNAP, trailblazer extraordinaire...OG Queen of Brooklyn."

"The woman who knew how to fight on all sides, you could never surround Shirley with too many enemies...To understand Shirley, one has to understand that she’s not just the first this, that or the other, she was up against the whole world when she ran for Congress. She was up against the Brooklyn machine, probably the most formidable in the country at the time. She was up against men, because the whole notion of this woman getting this rare seat to come up in New York was unheard of. Who did she think she was?...she was up against history. We were only then beginning to get used to having a critical mass — that’s all they were — of African-American men in Congress. She, for example, was part of the group that formed the Black Caucus. Now, here comes a woman, when there aren’t even many men, and said, look, I want to join you guys. Nobody was ready for it, but the black women in Brooklyn, who I think are chiefly responsible for putting her over, and then everybody joined the crowd."

"Whether you agree with her politics or not, she had a moral compass. Why I was attracted to her story was because in some ways she's an average American woman who evolved into a strong and courageous politician."

"Heroes: Grace Paley, Tillie Olsen, Shirley Chisholm — what a generation!"

"Rev. Jesse Jackson called her a "woman of great courage.""She was an activist, and she never stopped fighting,""She refused to accept the ordinary, and she had high expectations for herself and all people around her,""

"Very interesting woman, Shirley. Wants to be varied in her approaches. Likes to do the unexpected. She believes, as I do, in building the new coalition to change the Democratic Party, and if our hopes materialize we're going to have a lot of clout in 1972. What she's concerned about, as I am, is that we get a good candidate, not just an acceptable, tired old liberal"

"We Americans have come to feel that it is our mission to make the world free. We believe that we are always the good guys, everywhere-in Vietnam, in Latin America, wherever we go. We believe we are the good guys at home, too. When the Kemer Commission told white America what black America had always known, that prejudice and hatred built the nation's slums, maintain them and profit by them, white America would not believe it. But it is true. Unless we start to fight and defeat the enemies of poverty and racism in our own country and make our talk of equality and opportunity ring true, we are exposed as hypocrites in the eyes of the world when we talk about making other people free."

"Two more years of fantastic waste in the Defense Department and of penny pinching on social programs"

"Apparently launching those new [domestic social] programs can be delayed for a while, after all. It seems we have to get some missiles launched first."

"Mr. Nixon had said things like this: "If our cities are to be livable for the next generation, we can delay no long. er in launching new approaches to the problems that beset them and to the tensions that tear them apart." And he said, "When you cut expenditures for education, what you are doing is shortchanging the American future.” But frankly. I have never cared too much what people say. What I am interested in is what they do."

"As a teacher, and as a woman. I do not think I will ever understand what kind of values can be involved in spending nine billion dollars–and more, I am sure–on elaborate, unnecessary and impractical weapons when several thousand disadvantaged children in the nation's capital get nothing."

"I used to be a moderate. I spent twenty years going to all kinds of meetings, trying to find ways all of us, black and white, could work together. Thousands like me kept saying, "Let us in a little. Give us a piece of the pie." What happened? Watts, Newark, Hartford. And what was the reaction? We started to hear a new jargon about "the urban crisis" and "law and order" and "crime in the streets." Today I am a militant. Basically I agree with what many of the extremist groups are saying- except that their tactics are wrong and too often they have no program. But people had better start to understand that if this country's basic racism is not quickly and completely abolished- or at least controlled there will be real, full-scale revolution in the streets. I do not want to see that day come. But I think often of what Malcolm once said about freedom: "You get your freedom by letting your enemy know that you'll do anything to get your freedom. Then you'll get it. It's the only way you'll get it.""

"The attitudes some members of Congress display toward the rest of humanity, including their constituents, sometimes irritates and sometimes dismays me. They act like aristocrats. It has been a long time since Thomas Jefferson was sworn in as President, then rode his horse back to a boardinghouse and sat down to dinner with the rest of the roomers. Now even the most junior member of the House is surrounded by a hush of deference when he moves around the Hill."

"What is the alternative? What can we offer these beautiful, angry, serious, and committed young people? How are we all to be saved? The alternative, of course, is reform-renewal, revitalization of the institutions of this potentially great nation. This is our only hope. If my story has any importance, apart from its curiosity value the fascination of being a "first" at anything is a durable one- it is, I hope, that I have persisted in seeking this path toward a better world. My significance, I want to believe, is not that I am the first black woman elected to the U.S. Congress, but that I won public office without selling out to anyone. When I wrote my campaign slogan, "Unbossed and Unbought," it was an expression of what I believe I was and what I want to be-what I want all candidates for public office to be. We need men and women who have far greater abilities and far broader appeal than I will ever have, but who have my kind of independence- who will dare to declare that they are free of the old ways that have led us wrong, and who owe nothing to the traditional concentrations of capital and power that have subverted this nation's ideals. Such leaders must be found. But they will not be found as much as they will be created, by an electorate that has become ready to demand that it control its own destiny. There must be a new coalition of all Americans - black, white, red, yellow and brown, rich and poor - who are no longer willing to allow their rights as human beings to be infringed upon by anyone else, for any reason. We must join together to insist that this nation deliver on the promise it made, nearly 200 years ago, that every man be allowed to be a man. I feel an incredible urgency that we must do it now. If time has not run out, it is surely ominously short."

"Youth is in the process of being classed with the dark-skinned minorities as the object of popular scorn and hatred. It is as if the United States has to have a "nigger," a target for its hidden frustrations and guilt. Without someone to blame, like the Communists abroad and the young and black at home, middle America would be forced to consider whether all the problems of our time were in any way its own fault. That is the one thing it could never stand to do. Hence, it finds scapegoats."

"One question bothers me a lot: Who's listening to me? Some of the time, I feel dishearteningly small and futile. It's as if I'm facing a seamless brick wall, as if most people are deaf to what I try to say. It seems so clear to me what's wrong with the whole system. Why isn't it clear to most others? The majority of Americans do not want to hear the truth about how their country is ruled and for whom. They do not want to know why their children are rejecting them. They do not dare to have to rethink their whole lives. There is a vacuum of leadership, created partly by the bullets of deranged assassins. But whatever made it, all we see now is the same tired old men who keep trucking down front to give us the same old songs and dances."

"One distressing thing is the way men react to women who assert their equality: their ultimate weapon is to call them unfeminine."

"Some other black political leaders scolded me. I told them that no one has a right to call himself a leader unless he dares to lead."

"Discrimination against women in politics is particularly unjust, because no political organization I have seen could function without women."

"Men always underestimate women. They underestimated me, and they underestimated the women like me. If they had thought about it, they would have realized that many of the homes in black neighborhoods are headed by women. They stay put, raise their families and register to vote in greater numbers. The women are always organizing for something, even if it is only a bridge club. They run the PTA, they are the backbone of the social groups and civic clubs, more than the men. So the organization was already there."

"There was one all-black student group, the Harriet Tubman Society. Some upperclassmen had started it, about a year before I joined it in my sophomore year. There I first heard people other than my father talk about white oppression, black racial consciousness, and black pride. The black students kept to their own tables in the cafeteria. We talked. No one said "rap" then, but that's what we did. I had some things to contribute, more out of my reading than my experience. I knew about Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois and George W. Carver, and I had managed to find some books in the public library about our African heritage that few people then studied or talked about; I knew about the Ashanti kingdoms, for instance."

"I don't measure America by its achievement but by its potential."

"The difference between de jure and de facto segregation is the difference between open, forthright bigotry and the shamefaced kind that works through unwritten agreements between real estate dealers, school officials, and local politicians."

"When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses."

"Congress seems drugged and inert most of the time. Even when the problems it ignores build up to crises and erupt in strikes, riots, and demonstrations, it has not moved. Its idea of meeting a problem is to hold hearings or, in extreme cases, to appoint a commission."