Top 20 Quotes & Sayings by Johnnetta B. Cole

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American anthropologist Johnnetta B. Cole.

Last updated on April 14, 2025.

Johnnetta Betsch Cole is an American anthropologist, educator, museum director, and college president. Cole was the first female African-American president of Spelman College, a historically black college, serving from 1987 to 1997. She was president of Bennett College from 2002 to 2007. During 2009–2017 she was Director of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art.

American - Anthropologist | Born: October 19, 1936

Source: Wikipedia

The content of the curriculum should never exclude the realities of the very students who must intellectually wrestle with it. When students study all worlds except their own, they are miseducated.

Johnnetta B. Cole

There are not many of us African American Sister Presidents, and those of us who are in this field do not have an easy time of it. Why the story goes that one Black woman college president died and went to hell, and it was two weeks before she realized that she wasn't still on the job.

Johnnetta B. Cole

While it is true that without a vision the people perish, it is doubly true that without action the people and their vision perish as well.

Johnnetta B. Cole

What you give ought to be in direct relationship to what you've received. If you have been blessed with a great deal, then you have a lot of giving to do.

Johnnetta B. Cole

the trouble with a woman standing behind her man is that she can't see where she is going!

Johnnetta B. Cole

If folks can learn to be racist, then they can learn to be anti racist. If being sexist ain't genetic, then, dad gum, people can learn about gender equality.

Johnnetta B. Cole

if we center our lives on BMWs, RVs, VCRs, PCs and the other acronyms of consumerism, we cannot expect our children to do otherwise.

Johnnetta B. Cole

I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice.

Johnnetta B. Cole

Now, if you want to know my secret love, it is to be able to serve as an example.

Johnnetta B. Cole

Crisis' seems to be too mild a word to describe conditions in countless African-American communities. It is beyond crisis when in the richest nation in the world, African Americans in Harlem live shorter lives than the people of Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations of the world.

Johnnetta B. Cole

The histories of the poor and the powerless are as important as those of their conquerors, their colonizers, their kings and queens.

Johnnetta B. Cole

The myth of black women profiting at the expense of black men is the oldest rap around.

Johnnetta B. Cole

racism is alive and doing too well in America.

Johnnetta B. Cole

Faced with what seems like an impossible task, a group of folks will do well to remember the African proverb: When spider webs unite they can tie up a lion.

Johnnetta B. Cole

The ultimate expression of generosity is not in giving of what you have, but in giving of who you are.

Johnnetta B. Cole

The more we pull together toward a new day, the less it matters what pushed us apart in the past.

Johnnetta B. Cole

You cannot fully understand your own life without knowing and thinking beyond your life, your own neighborhood, and even your own nation.

Johnnetta B. Cole

An education that teaches you to understand something about the world has done only half of the assignment. The other half is to teach you to do something about making the world a better place.

Johnnetta B. Cole