My mom, Clida, taught my four brothers and me about her father's work to organize black voters in rural Louisiana in the 1950s. We carried her dad's legacy of activism with us. The Civil Rights Movement was present in the daily life of my family in Detroit in the 1970s.
Interpretation
This quote emphasizes the importance of family legacy and activism in shaping identity and social responsibility.
Keith Ellison reflects on the lessons imparted by his mother about the significance of activism and the effort to organize black voters during the Civil Rights Movement. He illustrates how these lessons were not just historical but were lived experiences for his family, instilling a sense of duty to continue this legacy of social justice and activism in their own lives.
In practice
During a speech at a community event advocating for voter registration.
While there are corporal descriptions of what the afterlife is like in Christianity, Islam and Judaism, what's going on there is the finite trying to describe the infinite. If God knows everything, started everything and is the only one who knows how it's going to end, how can any human know what God wants?
When I was a boy we didn't wake up with Vietnam and have Cyprus for lunch and the Congo for dinner.
Reconstruction was a vast labor movement of ignorant, muddled, and bewildered white men who had been disinherited of land and labor and fought a long battle with sheer subsistence, hanging on the edge of poverty, eating clay and chasing slaves and now lurching up to manhood.
There are a whole lot of historical factors that have played a part in our being where we are today, and I think that to even to begin to understand our contemporary issues and contemporary problems, you have to understand a little bit about that history.
When I started working on women's history about thirty years ago, the field did not exist. People didn't think that women had a history worth knowing.
If the history of England be ever written by one who has the knowledge and the courage,-and both qualities are equally requisite for the undertaking, - the world will be more astonished than when reading the Roman annals by Niebuhr.
All national histories are partisan and designed to give us a good conceit of ourselves.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.