Many of my fellow black people have complained that I did not do enough to celebrate Black History Month, which the month of February here in North America. I was not as enthusiastic as usual because I am sick and tired of being looked after and considered valuable only ONE MONTH a year! I mean I will still be here on March 1st, when the "black empowerment" ads disappear from the TV screens for another year (well maybe you'll see them once or twice - otherwise you are watching BET!); Am I less of a person then? Well people sure as hell make me feel like it... Nevertheless, before the month is over, I wanted to do something that had some sense. Below (click "Continue") are a few important quotes from icons of Black/African culture, that remind us of the rich, generous, resilient, and strong cultures we Black people stem from. It is constantly updated.
"I have fought against white domination, and I have fought against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and to achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die."
- Nelson R. Mandela
"When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!" - Martin Luther King, Jr.
"I might point out here that colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that is just confined to England or France or the United States. The interests in this country are in cahoots with the interests in France and the interests in Britain. It's one huge complex or combine, and it creates what's known not as the American power structure or the French power structure, but an international power structure. This international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources." -Malcolm X aka El-Hajj Malik Shabbaz
"We have seen our land seized in the name of allegedly legal laws which in fact recognized only that might is right. We have seen that the law was not the same for a white and foe a black, accommodating for the first, cruel and inhumane for the other. We have witnessed atrocious sufferings of those condemned for their political opinions or religious beliefs; exiled in their own country, their fate truly worse than death itself. We have seen that in the towns there were magnificent houses for the whites and crumbling shanties for the blacks; that a black was not admitted in the motion-picture houses, in the restaurants, in the stores of the Europeans; that a black traveled in the holds, at the feet of the whites in their luxury cabins. Who will forget the massacres where so many of our brothers perished, the cells into which those who refused to submit to a regime of oppression and exploitation were thrown? All that, my brothers , we have endured." -Patrice Lumumba
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