John Hope Franklin

“[The South's] 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.”

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

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

“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.”