A Quote by Ida B. Wells

The Afro-American is not a bestial race.

Ida B. Wells

Quote Topics

American Race

Quote Author

Ida B. Wells
American - Activist
July 16, 1862 - March 25, 1931

The Afro-American is not a bestial race. If this work can contribute in any way towards proving this, and at the same time arouse the conscience of the American people to a demand for justice to every citizen, and punishment by law for the lawless, I shall feel I have done my race a service. Other considerations are of minor importance.

Ida B. Wells

The lesson this teaches and which every Afro-American should ponder well, is that a Winchester rifle should have a place of honor in every black home, and it should be used for that protection which the law refuses to give. When the white man who is always the aggressor knows he runs as great a risk of biting the dust every time his Afro-American victim does, he will have greater respect for Afro-American life. The more the Afro-American yields and cringes and begs, the more he has to do so, the more he is insulted, outraged and lynched.

Ida B. Wells

Somebody must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen upon me to do so.

Ida B. Wells

The hearts of Afro-American women are too warm and too large for race hatred. Long suffering has so chastened them that they are developing a special sense of sympathy for all who suffer and fail of justice.

Fannie Barrier Williams

Someone must show that the Afro-American race is more sinned against than sinning, and it seems to have fallen to me to do so. The awful death roll called every week is appalling, not only because of the lives taken, the cruelty and outrage to the victims, but because of the prejudice it fosters.

William Wells Brown

The Afro-American experience is the only real culture that America has. Basically, every American tries to walk, talk, dress and behave like African Americans.

Hugh Masekela

From this bestial view that the human mind consists of only sense certainty, pleasure and pain, Locke developed an equally bestial theory of the nation. Man originally existed in a State of Nature of complete liberty.

Robert Trout

Jimi Hendrix came on TV on this documentary and it was this African-American soulful black guy, playing an electric guitar, which I'd just started. And it just blew my head off. I had like an afro at the time, too. It was a bit all over the place. And it wasn't a thing to have an afro. No, that's kind of quite old school. You're supposed to have like a neatly cut shaped up haircut.

Michael Kiwanuka

The Afro-American is thus the backbone of the South.

Ida B. Wells

Michael Jackson fundamentally altered the terms of the debate about African American music. Remember, he was a chocolate, cherubic-faced genius with an African American halo. He had an Afro halo. He was a kid who was capable of embodying all of the high possibilities and the deep griefs that besieged the African American psyche.

Michael Eric Dyson

We are not only a Latin American nation, we are an Afro-American nation also.

Fidel Castro

The mob spirit has grown with the increasing intelligence of the Afro-American.

Ida B. Wells

To say that the Afro American created jazz doesn't mean anything bad about Anglo Americans, and I always teach my younger jazz musicians that at this point the entirety of the American tradition is your heritage, and you need to know it.

Wynton Marsalis

I might be a Cuban American, but I'm also an Afro-Cuban American.

Jon Secada

Colored, Negro, Afro-American, African American. ... Every couple of years someone came up with something that got us an inch closer to the truth. Bit by bit we crept along. As if that thing we believed to be approaching actually existed.