Carter G. Woodson - The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933)

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When you control a man's thinking you do not have to worry about his actions. You do not have to tell him not to stand here or go yonder. He will find his "proper place" and will stay in it. You do not need to send him to the back door. He will go without being told. In fact, if there is no back door, he will cut one for his special benefit. His education makes it necessary.

Carter G. Woodson
And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race.

Carter G. Woodson
If the white man wants to hold on to it, let him do so; but the Negro, so far as he is able, should develop and carry out a program of his own.

Carter G. Woodson
One can cite cases of Negroes who opposed emancipation and denounced the abolitionists.

Carter G. Woodson
If Liberia has failed, then, it is no evidence of the failure of the Negro in government. It is merely evidence of the failure of slavery.

Carter G. Woodson
The strongest bank in the United States will last only so long as the people will have sufficient confidence in it to keep their money there.

Carter G. Woodson
Even schools for Negroes, then, are places where they must be convinced of their inferiority.

Carter G. Woodson
As another has well said, to handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worst sort of lynching.

Carter G. Woodson
They still have some money, and they have needs to supply. They must begin immediately to pool their earnings and organize industries to participate in supplying social and economic demands.

Carter G. Woodson
The bondage of the Negro brought captive from Africa is one of the greatest dramas in history, and the writer who merely sees in that ordeal something to approve or condemn fails to understand the evolution of the human race.

Carter G. Woodson
If you teach the Negro that he has accomplished as much good as any other race he will aspire to equality and justice without regard to race. Such an effort would upset the program of the oppressor in Africa and America. Play up before the Negro, then, his crimes and shortcomings. Let him learn to admire the Hebrew, the Greek, the Latin and the Teuton. Lead the Negro to detest the man of African blood—to hate himself.

Carter G. Woodson
If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

Carter G. Woodson
This assumption of Negro leadership in the ghetto, then, must not be confined to matters of religion, education, and social uplift; it must deal with such fundamental forces in life as make these things possible.

Carter G. Woodson
Negroes who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities for development are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination.

Carter G. Woodson
In our so-called democracy we are accustomed to give the majority what they want rather than educate them to understand what is best for them.

Carter G. Woodson
The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers.

Carter G. Woodson
The mere imparting of information is not education. Above all things, the effort must result in making a man think and do for himself.

Carter G. Woodson
In schools of theology Negroes are taught the interpretation of the Bible worked out by those who have justified segregation and winked at the economic debasement of the Negro at times almost to the point of starvation.

Carter G. Woodson
The real servant of the people must live among them, think with them, feel for them, and die for them.

Carter G. Woodson
The same educational process which inspires and stimulates the oppressor with the thought that he is everything and has accomplished everything worth while, depresses and crushes at the same time the spark of genius in the Negro by making him feel that his race does not amount to much and never will measure up to the standards of other peoples.

Carter G. Woodson
The world does not want and will never have the heroes and heroines of the past. What this age needs is an enlightened youth not to undertake the tasks like theirs but to imbibe the spirit of these great men and answer the present call of duty with equal nobleness of soul.

Carter G. Woodson
Real education means to inspire people to live more abundantly, to learn to begin with life as they find it and make it better.

Carter G. Woodson
Why not exploit, enslave, or exterminate a class that everybody is taught to regard as inferior?

Carter G. Woodson
It may be well to repeat here the saying that old men talk of what they have done, young men of what they are doing, and fools of what they expect to do. The Negro race has a rather large share of the last mentioned class.

Carter G. Woodson
In fact, the confidence of the people is worth more than money.

Carter G. Woodson