Quotes by John Hope Franklin

“We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.”

““We know all too little about the factors that affect the attitudes of the peoples of the world toward one another. It is clear, however, that color and race are at once the most important and the most enigmatic.””

“We also learn that this country and the Western world have no monopoly of goodness and truth and scholarship, we begin to appreciate the ingredients that are indispensable to making a better world. In a life of learning that is, perhaps, the greatest lesson of all.”

“If the house is to be set in order, one cannot begin with the present; he must begin with the past.”

“One feels the excitement of hearing an untold story.”

“I think hes been in every courthouse basement in the South,”

“We are going to do our best to reach out to every citizen of the United States, to engage them in every way possible, and to make certain that they appreciate fully the opportunity which we have to do something not only significant but even spectacular.”

“Her determination (was) to stand up, not merely for herself, not merely for all women, not merely for African-Americans but for all Americans.”

“I want to be out there on the firing line, helping, directing or doing something to try to make this a better world, a better place to live,”

“Im just waiting to see if it will happen. Ive been disillusioned so many times before. Its 2006, and theres nothing in the nations capital to show what happened to African-Americans. Nothing.”

“The circumstances are remarkable when you stop to think about what you couldnt do in Raleigh and in Richmond. After 1831, they didnt want blacks to learn the ABCs. She put those boys in school,”

“We cant undo this part of our heritage. But what we can affect is where we are headed. I want to talk about multiculturalism, because I think thats where we are headed.”

“Its not so much Katrina as a phenomenon as its Katrina as a metaphor for what our society has become. It reflects; its a mirror of what weve become - super-extraordinarily complacent.”

“. . . Historical facts are all pervasive and cut through the most rigid barriers of race and caste.”

“Education came to be one of the great preoccupations, enlightenment was viewed as the greatest single opportunity to escape . . . . Parents made untold sacrifice to secure learning for their children that they had been denied.”

“It was necessary, as a black historian, to have a personal agenda.”

[The Souths] obsession was to maintain a government, an economy, an arrangement of the sexes, a relationship of the races, and a social system that had never existed...except in the fertile imagination of those who would not confront either the reality that existed or the change that would bring them closer to reality.

We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey;

We also learn that this country and the Western world have no monopoly of goodness and truth and scholarship, we begin to appreciate the ingredients that are indispensable to making a better world. In a life of learning that is, perhaps, the greatest lesson of all.

We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.