“But we believed if we kept on working, if we kept on marching, if we kept on voting, if we kept on believing, we would make America beautiful for everybody.”

—  Al Sharpton

From the 2004 DNC

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "But we believed if we kept on working, if we kept on marching, if we kept on voting, if we kept on believing, we would …" by Al Sharpton?
Al Sharpton photo
Al Sharpton 26
American Baptist minister, civil rights activist, and telev… 1954

Related quotes

Barack Obama photo

“The March on Washington teaches us that we are not trapped by the mistakes of history; that we are masters of our fate. But it also teaches us that the promise of this nation will only be kept when we work together.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2013, "Let Freedom Ring" Ceremony (August 2013)
Context: The March on Washington teaches us that we are not trapped by the mistakes of history; that we are masters of our fate. But it also teaches us that the promise of this nation will only be kept when we work together. We’ll have to reignite the embers of empathy and fellow feeling, the coalition of conscience that found expression in this place 50 years ago. And I believe that spirit is there, that truth force inside each of us. I see it when a white mother recognizes her own daughter in the face of a poor black child. I see it when the black youth thinks of his own grandfather in the dignified steps of an elderly white man. It’s there when the native-born recognizing that striving spirit of the new immigrant; when the interracial couple connects the pain of a gay couple who are discriminated against and understands it as their own. That’s where courage comes from -- when we turn not from each other, or on each other, but towards one another, and we find that we do not walk alone. That’s where courage comes from.

Opal Tometi photo

“We also believe that we cannot truly become free when marginalised Black communities are kept at the margins and are forgotten. We don't believe that there can be a trickle-down social justice. We believe that people on the margins must be brought centre.”

Opal Tometi (1984) Nigerian–American writer, strategist and community organizer

Black Lives Matter Was Always Designed to Be a Global Movement, Vice] (7 July 2020)

Siobhan Fahey photo

“We were written off from day one. Nobody believed in us but us. We kept having hits despite the record company, despite the press.”

Siobhan Fahey (1958) singer and songwriter in Banarama and Shakespears Sister

On Bananarama
G3 interview (2002)

Barack Obama photo

“And so abolitionists and freedmen and women and radical Republicans kept cajoling and kept rabble-rousing, and within a few years of the war’s end at Appomattox, we passed two more amendments guaranteeing voting rights, birthright citizenship, equal protection under the law.”

Barack Obama (1961) 44th President of the United States of America

2015, Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the 13th Amendment (December 2015)
Context: At its heart, the question of slavery was never simply about civil rights. It was about the meaning of America, the kind of country we wanted to be –- whether this nation might fulfill the call of its birth: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights,” that among those are life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness. President Lincoln understood that if we were ever to fully realize that founding promise, it meant not just signing an Emancipation Proclamation, not just winning a war. It meant making the most powerful collective statement we can in our democracy: etching our values into our Constitution. He called it “a King’s cure for all the evils.” A hundred and fifty years proved the cure to be necessary but not sufficient. Progress proved halting, too often deferred. Newly freed slaves may have been liberated by the letter of the law, but their daily lives told another tale. They couldn’t vote. They couldn’t fill most occupations. They couldn’t protect themselves or their families from indignity or from violence. And so abolitionists and freedmen and women and radical Republicans kept cajoling and kept rabble-rousing, and within a few years of the war’s end at Appomattox, we passed two more amendments guaranteeing voting rights, birthright citizenship, equal protection under the law.

John Updike photo
Mwanandeke Kindembo photo
Fali Sam Nariman photo

“We in this country also need to make sure that the doors of learning are always kept open because India still belongs to the developing world.”

Fali Sam Nariman (1929) Indian politician

Affirmative action, not quotas for education': Nariman

Lyndon B. Johnson photo
George Bernard Shaw photo

“There are no secrets better kept than the secrets everybody guesses.”

Crofts, Act III
Variant: There are no secrets except the secrets that keep themselves.
Source: 1890s, Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893)

Chetan Bhagat photo

Related topics