Inspiring quotes and books
- Barack Obama worked as a community organizer in Chicago for three years in the 1980's. He often talks about lessons he learned about people and change during his campaign.
Lew Finfer, MCAN Director, met with him 1:1 when he was a Harvard Law Student in the early 1990's and tried to see if he was interested in organizing in Massachusetts. He told him, "I have a plan to return to Chicago and go into politics". It looks like we are all fortunate that he had a plan and I didn't do a good job of interesting him in staying in Massachusetts and working here!!
A portion of Barack Obama's speech on the night of the Iowa Primary:
"I know this.
I'll never forget this training began on the streets of Chicago doing what so many of you have done.
Organizing and working to make people's lives just a little bit better.
I know how hard it is.
It comes with little sleep, little pay, and alot of sacrifice.
There are days of disappointment.
But sometimes, just sometimes, there are nights like this.
A night that years from now when we've made the changes we believe in..
when more families can afford to see a doctor
when the world sees America differently...
You'll be able to look back with pride and say that this was the moment when it all began.
This was the moment.
Years from now, you'll look back when America began to know what it means to hope...
Hope is, something better awaits us if we have the courage to work for it, to fight for it...
- "Salvation for a race, nation, or class must come from within. Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted. Freedom and justice must be struggled for by the oppressed of all lands and races, and the struggle must be continuous, for freedom is never a final fact, but a continuing evolving process to higher and higher levels of human, social, economic, political, and religious relationships."
A. Philip Randolph
Founder of the first Black led union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Workers, his threat to organize a March on Washington to protest discrimination against Blacks in hiring for defense work lead to President Roosevelt issueing an Executive Order against such discrimination, and he led the organizing of the Civil Rights March on Washington in 1963.
- "In our sleep, pain which cannot forget, falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom, through the awful grace of God."
Robert Kennedy quoted the ancient Greek playright Aeschylus on April 4, 1968 when he broke the news of Rev. Martin Luther King's assassination to a campaign rally in a predominantly Black neighborhood of Gary, Indiana.
- "Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate.
Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure...
As we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates ohers.
1994 Inaugural Speech of Nelson Mandela
- "If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground....This struggle may be a
moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what people will submit to, and you have found out the exact amount of injustice and wrong which will be imposed on them; and these will continue until they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
Frederick Douglas Letter to an abolitionist associate, 1849
- “So pharonic oppression, deliverance, Sinai, and Canaan are still with us, powerful memories shaping our perceptions of the political world....
We still believe, or many of us do, what the Exodus first taught, or what it has commonly been taken to teach, about the meaning and possibility of politics and about its proper form:
--first, that wherever you live, it is probably Egypt;
--second, that there is a better, place, a world more attractive, a promised land;
--and third, that “the way to the land is through the wilderness.” there is no way to get from here to there except by joining together and marching.”
from Exodus and Revolution by Michael Walzer
- Robert Moses is the legendary Civil Rights organizer from the 1960’s who continues today to do innovative education work through the Algebra Project. He said at a SNCC Civil Rights reunion held 25 years later:
“the only way to recapture the promise of the Civil Rights Movement is bite by bite through community organizing.”
- The poet Thomas McGrath wrote in his poem “Letter to an Imaginary Friend”,
Blessed the agitator; whose touch makes the dead walk;
Blessed the organizer; who discovers the strength of wounds;
Blessed all fighters.
- The recently deceased Rev. William Sloan Coffin was active in Civil Rights, anti-Vietnam War, and disarmament movements for almost half a century. He said it well when he wrote, “Realism demands pessimism. But hope demands that we take a dark view of the present only because we hold a bright view of the future; and hope arouses, as nothing else can arouse, a passion for the possible.”