Black History Month 2013 began, Feb. 1, 2013, and reviewing the thoughts, perspectives and contributions of prominent popular and civic leaders helps us to put the month into perspective.

 

     Here is a compilation of 15 quotes from prominent people worth reflecting on this Black History Month. Feel free to share and pass along with your family and friends.  Celebrate the voices of our past who have played an important role in shaping our present and who will continue to guide us to our future.

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"Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise. I rise. I rise." 

 -Maya Angelou

 

"Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated."   -Coretta Scott King

 

"I have learned over the years that when one's mind is made up, this diminishes fear."  -Rosa Parks

 

"Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that."  -Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

"The battles that count aren't the ones for gold medals. The struggles within yourself--the invisible, inevitable battles inside all of us--that's where it's at." 

  -Jesse Owens

 

"I am where I am because of the bridges that I crossed. Sojourner Truth was a bridge. Harriet Tubman was a bridge. Ida B. Wells was a bridge. Madame C. J. Walker was a bridge. Fannie Lou Hamer was a bridge."   -Oprah Winfrey

 

"I have observed this in my experience of slavery, that whenever my condition was improved, instead of increasing my contentment; it only increased my desire to be free, and set me thinking of plans to gain my freedom." -Frederick Douglas

 

"The cost of liberty is less than the price of repression."   -W.E.B. Du Bois

 

"We should emphasize not Negro History, but the Negro in history. What we need is not a history of selected races or nations, but the history of the world void of national bias, race hate, and religious prejudice."   -Carter Woodson

 

"The past is a ghost, the future a dream. All we ever have is now." -Bill Cosby

 

"Do not call for black power or green power. Call for brain power." -Barbara Jordan

 

"For I am my mother's daughter, and the drums of Africa still beat in my heart." -Mary McLeod Bethune

 

"God gives nothing to those who keep their arms crossed." -African Proverb

 

"Freedom is never given; it is won." -A. Philip Randolph

 

"Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed." -Booker T. Washington

 

  

In 1996, Dolly Parton launched an exciting new literacy effort, The Imagination Library, to benefit the children of her home county in East Tennessee, USA. Dolly's vision was to foster a love of reading among her county's preschool children and their families by providing them with the gift of a specially selected book each month. By mailing high quality, age-appropriate books directly to their homes, she wanted children to be excited about books and to feel the magic that books can create. Moreover, she could insure that every child would have books, regardless of their family's income.