Joann Gardner

“It is too often forgotten that when the Europeans emerged and began to extend themselves into the broader world of Africa and Asia during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they went on to colonize most of mankind. Later they would colonize world scholarship, mainly the writing of history. History was then written or rewritten to show or imply that Europeans were the only creators of what could be called a civilization. In order to accomplish this, the Europeans had to forget, or pretend to forget, all they previously knew about Africa.”
― J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, Volume I

“She did not tell them to clean up their lives, or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek, or its glory-bound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have is the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they could not have it.”
― Toni Morrison, Beloved

“anthropologists, while pretending to scorn the biblical story of the origin of man and his distribution over the earth, continue to use such terms as “Hamitic” for the Ethiopians and “Semitic” for the Jews. These terms, if they have any meaning at all, designate only language groups, precisely as Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Arab. It is as nonsensical to talk of a Jewish race as it is to talk of a Christian one.”
― J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, Volume I

“So I preached from Luke, chapter eighteen, verses one through eight: the parable of the importunate widow. It’s one I’ve always liked. A widow is so persistent in her demands for justice that she overcomes the resistance of a judge who fears neither God nor man. She wears him down. Moral: The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn’t always safe, but it’s often necessary.”
― Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower