African American Voters Quotes

Dear Black Girls and Black Women… WE matter. Our presence matters, our voices matter, and our votes matter. Make no mistake about it… WE ARE POWERFUL. We disrupt the norm and change the system for the betterment of ALL people. ~ Stephanie Lahart

I think you had the GOP down there in North Carolina reaching out to African-American voters and this guy coming on television and using the N-word and saying what Don Yelton said. ~ Aasif Mandvi

We did really, really badly with older African-American voters. I mean we got decimated. ~ Bernie Sanders

The radical philosophy offered, for many African Americans, the most promise. It was predicated on a searing critique of large corporations, particularly railroads, and the wealthy elite in the North and South. The radicals of the late nineteenth century, who later formed the Populist Party, viewed the privileged classes as conspiring to keep poor whites and blacks locked into a subordinate political and economic position. For many African American voters, the Populist approach was preferable to the paternalism of liberals. ~ Michelle Alexander

In 2008, the Democrats made a great effort among African-American voters, and they did increase their turnout considerably, and among Latino voters. ~ Judy Woodruff

I have this ability to find this hidden talent in people that sometimes even they didn't know they had. ~ Berry Gordy

You leave your neighborhood but you never want to forget where you came from," he says. "I have the best of best worlds. I'm street smart and book smart. You put that together in an African-American male and that's dangerous. ~ Anonymous

I think that there are some people on the so-called Left who might say we have to circle our wagons around the first African American president, and to me that is racism in reverse because his policies are actually still the racist policies of empire. ~ Cindy Sheehan

I think most people write from what they see in their own world, which is maybe why we so often see an African-American woman as the best friend, or the one you bring in when you need some sass. It's like we're put in a box. ~ Tika Sumpter

Some people say, "What difference does it make what color the winemaker is that made the wine? Judge the wines off their own merit." Like, of course. And I do believe that my wine is judged off its own merit. But the fact is that when you walk into places and people can't believe that you're the principal or you're the owner or you made the wine, it's mind-blowing to me some days. It's like, wow. That's why we need to continue talking about it. ~ Andre Hueston Mack

Some Republicans gave up on winning the African-American vote, looking the other way or trying to benefit politically from racial polarization. I am here today as the Republican chairman to tell you we were wrong. ~ Ken Mehlman

According to the American Heart Association, the prevalence of hypertension in African Americans in the United States is among the highest in the world. ~ Xavier Becerra

You will never finish your novels if you don't take it one word at a time ~ Terrence LeRoy Baker

I suggest that Black feminist thought consists of specialised knowledge created by African-American women which clarifies a standpoint of and for Black women. In other words, Black feminist thought encompasses theoretical interpretations of Black women's reality by those who live it. ~ Patricia Hill Collins

None of us is responsible for the complexion of his skin. This fact of nature offers no clue to the character or quality of the person underneath. ~ Marian Anderson

I don't think there is such a definition of a perfect family, but I do think that our marriages are in crisis. Our families are in crisis. And I think the African-American family is at one of the worst stages it's been at in a very long time in this country. Fatherlessness is rampant. ~ Leah Ward Sears

In every crisis there is a message ... ~ Susan L. Taylor

The ordinary American voter does not object to mediocrity. He likes his candidate to be sensible, vigorous, and, above all, what he calls 'magnetic,' and does not value, because he sees no need for, originality or profundity, a fine culture or a wide knowledge. ~ James Bryce

You see the one thing I've always maintained is that I'm an American Indian. I'm not a Native American. I'm not politically correct. Everyone who's born in the Western Hemisphere is a Native American. We are all Native Americans. And if you notice, I put American before my ethnicity. I'm not a hyphenated African-American or Irish-American or Jewish-American or Mexican-American. ~ Russell Means

I would like to be known as a person who is concerned about freedom and equality and justice and prosperity for all people. ~ Rosa Parks

Until the arrival of Spanish troops in 1920, Chefchaouen had been visited by just three Westerners. Two were missionary explorers: Charles de Foucauld, a Frenchman who spent just an hour in the town in 1883, disguised as a Jewish rabbi, and William Summers, an American who was poisoned by the townsfolk here in 1892. The third, in 1889, was the British journalist Walter Harris, whose main impulse, as described in his book, Land of an African Sultan, was "the very fact that there existed within thirty hours' ride of Tangier a city in which it was considered an utter impossibility for a Christian to enter". Thankfully, Chefchaouen today is more welcoming towards outsiders, and a number of the Medina's newer guesthouses now include owners hailing from Britain, Italy and the former Christian enemy, Spain. ~ Daniel Jacobs

Donald Trump trying to do to the American voter what he did to the people that signed up for this course: He's making promises he has no intention of keeping. ~ Mitt Romney

When I was a child, to call someone 'black' was an insult, a curse word, something that made you fight.
But to me it contains all of the history of oppression and resistance, of being close to the soil and the sky, of plain speaking. Of The Journey. ~ Bonnie Greer

Older people of color in the South would occasionally come up to me after speeches to complain about how antagonized they feel when they hear news commentators talking about how we were dealing with domestic terrorism for the first time in the United States after the 9/11 attacks. An older African American man once said to me, "You make them stop saying that! We grew up with terrorism all the time. The police, the Klan, anybody who was white could terrorize you. We had to worry about bombings and lynchings, racial violence of all kinds. ~ Bryan Stevenson

We have created a new caste system that forces thousands of people into homelessness, bans them from living with their families and in their communities, and renders them virtually unemployable. Some states permanently strip people with criminal convictions of the right to vote; as a result, in several Southern states disenfranchisement among African American men has reached levels unseen since before the Voting Rights Act of 1965. ~ Bryan Stevenson

Fighters find it hard to give up doing what they do best - fighting for a living. ~ Evander Holyfield

Everyone says we have our first African American president. Has there ever been a Jewish president? An Italian president? They don't say a damn thing about that. You think we're still fighting the Civil War or something. If you want to mention it in passing, OK. But don't dwell on it. ~ Monte Irvin

I remember reading article about the woman in that Oakland neighborhood who lost all her children to violence. I wondered why'd she keep living there after the first one was killed. Didn't she care about the others?
Today, I zoomed out and wondered why I'm still in America. ~ Darnell Lamont Walker

There are African-American families around this country - a large, large number of African-American families - that operate out of complete fear that their kids are going to be taken from them and will do anything to prevent that. ~ Ta-Nehisi Coates

We know that African American students tend to be relational learners. It's about the relationships between a teacher and student. Students respond well to teachers they know, believe in them, care about them, but also who teach in a matter that elicits a more active approach to learning, rather than just sitting and listening. The research on this is strong and has been available for a long time, but it is not widely practiced. That's a huge obstacle. ~ Pedro Noguera

I could fall in love with a sumo wrestler if he told stories and made me laugh. Obviously, it would be easier if someone was African-American and lived next door and went to the same church. Because then I wouldn't have to translate. ~ Maya Angelou

The outside world told black kids when I was growing up that we weren't worth anything. But our parents said it wasn't so, and our churches and our schoolteachers said it wasn't so. They believed in us, and we, therefore, believed in ourselves. ~ Marian Wright Edelman

Hungry people cannot be good at learning or producing anything, except perhaps violence. ~ Pearl Bailey

It's an honor to be a part of Magic Shave as their new ambassador. One of the problems that some African-American men have with shaving is razor bumps. Magic Shave is perfect because once you eliminate the razor, you eliminate the bumps, and it's so easy to use. ~ Lance Gross

I sometimes wish I were African American because people don't bash them afterward. It's the hardest to be a woman. ~ Julie Delpy

Country music is the combination of African and European folk songs coming together and doing a little waltz right here in the American south. They came together at some cotillion, and somebody snuck a black person into the room, and he danced with a white lady, and music was born. ~ Ketch Secor

You know what the lowest rated episode we ever had was? Where Captain Kirk kissed Uhuru - a white man kissing an African-American woman. All the stations in the American South - in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana - refused to air it. And so our ratings plummeted. ~ George Takei

This African American Vernacular English shares most of its grammar and vocabulary with other dialects of English. But it is distinct in many ways, and it is more different from standard English than any other dialect spoken in continental North America. ~ William Labov

As the years passed, new myths arose to explain the mysterious objects the strangers brought from the land of the dead. A nineteenth-century missionary recorded, for example, an African explanation of what happened when captains descended into the holds of their ships to fetch trading goods like cloth. The Africans believed that these goods came not from the ship itself but from a hole that led into the ocean. Sea sprites weave this cloth in an "oceanic factory, and, whenever we need cloth, the captain ... goes to this hole and rings a bell." The sea sprites hand him up their cloth, and the captain "then throws in, as payment, a few dead bodies of black people he has bought from those bad native traders who have bewitched their people and sold them to the white men." The myth was not so far from reality. For what was slavery in the American South, after all, but a system for transforming the labor of black bodies, via cotton plantations, into cloth? ~ Adam Hochschild

The Latin American has no tribe to fall back on, as the African does, no reliable judiciary to defend his rights as the European does, no social ideal or sacred constitution as the North American does, no pervasive mythology to soften life as it does in Asia, and no even an ideology to subscribe to, as does the Russian or Chinese. Without wealth, what is there left to him but his manhood, to be flaunted and defended at every occasion? ~ Ted Simon

Over the past few decades we have developed euphemisms to help us forget how we, as a nation, have segregated African American citizens. We have become embarrassed about saying "ghetto", a word that accurately describes a neighborhood where government has not only concentrated a minority but established barriers to its exit. We don't hesitate to acknowledge that Jews in eastern Europe were forced to live in ghettos where opportunity was limited and leaving was difficult or impossible. Yet when we encounter similar neighborhoods in this country, we now delicately refer to them as "the inner city", yet everyone knows what we mean. When affluent whites gentrify the same geographic areas, we don't characterize those whites as "inner city families". Before we became ashamed to admit that the country had circumscribed African Americans in ghettos, analysts of race relations, both African American and white, consistently and accurately used "ghetto" to describe low-income African American neighborhoods created by public policy, with a shortage of opportunity, and with barriers to exit. ~ Richard Rothstein

Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it. ~ Rosa Parks

When I was growing up, Brandy was TV star, reality star, a pop star, a Cover girl, Grammy winner, had her own Brandy doll, and was the first African American to play Disney princess Cinderella. Most importantly, she is a survivor. Many only judge and remember a person's most recent failure. ~ Niecy Nash

Me being black. It doesn't mean I only qualify to be shoot at, arrested or to be killed. There are more certificates I deserve , rather than death certificate. Why is it a crime for me to live? ~ De Philosopher DJ Kyos

Many African-American men are incarcerated. And so African-American women do carry an enormous burden. And traditionally have carried a greater burden than perhaps their white counterparts. ~ Faye Wattleton

As you become more clear about who ... ~ Oprah Winfrey

Slave ships landed more than 1.5 million African captives on British Caribbean islands (primarily Jamaica and Barbados) by the late 1700s and had brought more than 2 million to Brazil. In North America, however, the numbers of the enslaved grew, except in the most malarial lowlands of the Carolina rice country. By 1775, 500,000 of the thirteen colonies' 2.5 million inhabitants were slaves, about the same as the number of slaves then alive in the British Caribbean colonies. Slave labor was crucial to the North American colonies. Tobacco shipments from the ~ Edward E. Baptist

I think the only way one can really determine whether extremism in the defense of liberty is justified, is not to approach it as an american or a european or an African or an Asian, but as a human being. If we look upon it as different types immediately we begin to think in terms of extremism being good for one and bad for another, or bad for one and good for another. But if we look upon it, if we look upon ourselves as human beings, I doubt that anyone will deny that extremism, in defense of liberty, the liberty of any human being. ~ Malcolm X

There is something so deeply visceral about libraries for me-rooms and rooms full of people dreaming and remembering. ~ Jacqueline Woodson

I am tired with hyphenated Americans! We are not Indian-Americans, or African-Americans. ~ Bobby Jindal

I'm African American, I'm a lot of other things, a musician and an artist. But that woman part holds the most pain for me. And therefore, obviously, the most lessons. ~ India.Arie

Fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge. Only Fools despise wisdom and discipline.
Proverbs 1:7 NLT ~ Eddie Johnson