28 Days of Wisdom for Black History Month 2023
Below you will find one piece of wisdom for you to reflect on each day in the month of February from a notable person of African descent. This collection of quotes features historical and contemporary figures. They have been beneficial to me, I hope they do the same for you. Happy Black History Month!
This is the fourth annual list. You can read the first three here:
February 1, 2023: “Many of us seek community solely to escape the fear of being alone. Knowing how to be solitary is central to the art of loving. When we can be alone, we can be with others without using them as a means of escape.” -bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions (1999)
February 2, 2023: “Black people should not have to be perfect to stay alive, be seen, and be loved. Black History Month is not just telling stories of how we have been “exceptional”. It is about embracing the fullness of our lives and creating a world where we are free to be human.” -Danté Stewart, theologian and author of Shoutin’ in the Fire: An American Epistle (2021)
February 3, 2023: “Never be limited by other people’s limited imaginations…If you adopt their attitudes, then the possibility won’t exist because you’ll have already shut it out.” -Mae Jemison, engineer, physician, and astronaut
February 4, 2023: “There are 42 million Black Americans, and therefore there are 42 million ways to be Black in America.” -Henry Louis Gates, Jr., literary critic, historian, and filmmaker
February 5, 2023: “I think sometimes women face the real risk of not being seen, and not being heard, and so that’s why I always tell young women, make yourself seen, and make yourself heard- this is your idea, this is your thought. Own it, express it, be the voice that people hear.” -Loretta Lynch, former U.S. Attorney General (2015–2017)
February 6, 2023: “During the 385 years since the first of our ancestors were brought here against their will, we have barely had time to catch our collective breath. That we are here at all can be seen as a testament to our willpower, spiritual strength, and resilience.” -Dr. Joy DeGruy, Post Traumatic Slave Syndrome (2005)
February 7, 2023: “There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know.” -W. E. B. Du Bois
February 8, 2023: “That’s the problem. We let people say stuff and they say it so much that it becomes okay to them and normal for us. What’s the point of having a voice if you’re gonna be silent in those moments you shouldn’t be?” -Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give (2017)
February 9, 2023: “In most action movies, one person rises out of a humble beginning to discover that they have been chosen by destiny to save the world. But that’s not how it works in real life. You rise out of your humble beginning to become part of a community, and it is only together and as equals that we will save the world.” -Kevin Hart, I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons (2017)
February 10, 2023: “A journey is called that because you cannot know what you will discover on the journey, what you will do with what you find, or what you find will do to you.” -James Baldwin
February 11, 2023: “A religion that professes a concern for the souls of men and is not equally concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them, and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion.” -Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., “Pilgrimage to Nonviolence”
February 12, 2023: “Home is what you think about when you don’t want to be where you are.” -Casey Gerald, There Will Be No Miracles Here: A Memoir (2018)
February 13, 2023: “There are no new ideas. There are only new ways of making them felt.” -Audre Lorde
February 14, 2023: “A person doesn’t have to be alive to be your mentor.” -Coach George Raveling
February 15, 2023: “To handicap a student by teaching him that his black face is a curse and that his struggle to change his condition is hopeless is the worse kind of lynching.” -Dr. Carter G. Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro (1933)
February 16, 2023: “If you’re not careful, you’ll get caught up in the words of racism and miss the works of racism because some people who engage in the works of racism never use the words.” -Rev. Dr. William J. Barber II, We Are Called to Be A Movement (2020)
February 17, 2023: “Our ‘histories’ are not separate at all, but are really just one big complicated, messy story of our beginnings on this soil. We may collectively or individually have separate ways of seeing and experiencing our history, and we can choose to claim some parts of that history and not others. But through our institutions, our policies, our changing social mores and beliefs, we continue to navigate, negotiate, revisit, and revise the legacy of our multiple experiences in the United States.” -Carolyn Finney, Black Faces, White Spaces: Reimagining the Relationship of African Americans to the Great Outdoors (2014)
February 18, 2023: “You may tie us and then taunt us for a lack of bravery, but one day we will break the bonds. You may use our labor for two and a half centuries and then taunt us for our poverty, but let me remind you we will not always remain poor. You may withhold even the knowledge of how to read God’s word and learn the way from earth to glory and then taunt us for our ignorance, but we would remind you that there is plenty of room at the top, and we are climbing.” -Rep. George H. White, Congressional Farewell Address, January 29, 1901
February 19, 2023: “Willful ignorance about injustice is an American habit, even among those of us who experience injustices. And despite myself, I am thoroughly American. Humility is something I have to learn.” -Imani Perry, “How to Be An Honest Historian”
February 20, 2023: “Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose. It is seeking that he who wishes may know the cosmic secrets of the world and they that dwell therein.” -Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942)
February 21, 2023: “I was brought into this world by the patchwork of coincidence and plans, and I will leave this world tethered to as many lives that tether me. ” -Remica Bingham-Risher, Soul Culture: Black Poets, Books, and Questions That Grew Me Up (2022)
February 22, 2023: “The man who views the world at fifty the same as he did at twenty has wasted thirty years of his life.” -Muhammad Ali
February 23, 2023: “If you are neutral in situations of injustice, you have chosen the side of the oppressor.” -Archbishop Desmond Tutu
February 24, 2023: “I know that in my business popularity is a weedy growth- here today, gone tomorrow. I’ve learned by livin’ and watchin’ that there is only eighteen inches between a pat on the back and a kick in the seat of the pants.” -Hattie McDaniel, from Hattie McDaniel: Black Ambition, White Hollywood by Jill Watts (2005)
February 25, 2023: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do it. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.” -Howard Thurman
February 26, 2023: “Every choice we make is a new tomorrow. Whole worlds waiting to be born.” -P. Djèlí Clark, Ring Shout (2020)
February 27, 2023: “I don’t have any time to stay up all night worrying about what someone who doesn’t love me has to say about me.” -Viola Davis
February 28, 2023: “Others will try to teach you that strength is little more than constantly setting yourself to the task of proving that someone else is weaker than you. I say that strength is far more than that. It is proving to yourself day after day that you are capable of more than you were yesterday.” -Brian Broome, Punch Me Up to the Gods (2021)
