Johnnetta B. Cole famous quotes

04-17-2025

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

#Expression #Generosity #Giving
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

#Injustice #Segregation #Grew Up
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

#Ties #Groups #Tasks
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

#Blessed #Giving #Deals
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

#Thinking #Knowing #Path
racism is alive and doing too well in America.
-- Johnnetta B. Cole

#America #Racism #Alive
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

#Children #Rvs #Bmw
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

#Education #Jobs #College
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

#Education #Reality #World
the trouble with a woman standing behind her man is that she can't see where she is going!
-- Johnnetta B. Cole

#Men #Trouble #Behinds
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

#Racism #People #Community
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

#People #Vision #Action
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

#Dad #People #Racist
The myth of black women profiting at the expense of black men is the oldest rap around.
-- Johnnetta B. Cole

#Rap #Men #Black
The more we pull together toward a new day, the less it matters what pushed us apart in the past.
-- Johnnetta B. Cole

#Past #New Day #Together
Now, if you want to know my secret love, it is to be able to serve as an example.
-- Johnnetta B. Cole

#Secret Love #Example #Want
Show me someone content with mediocrity and I'll show you someone destined for failure.
-- Johnnetta B. Cole

#Mediocrity #Show Me #Shows
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

#Family #Queens #Kings
The woman who bore me is no longer alive, but I seem to be her daughter in increasingly profound ways.
-- Johnnetta B. Cole

#Daughter #Profound #Alive

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