Quotes

• Thing"I have listened to you for nearly two hours. You have talked and sung and prayed about dying, and forgiving your enemies, and of feeling sure you are going to be received in heaven because you are innocent of the offense for which you expect to be electrocuted. But why don't you pray to live and ask to be freed? Let all your songs and prayers be songs of faith and hope that God will set you free. Quit talking about dying. If you believe that God is all-powerful, believe he is powerful enough to open these prison doors. Dying is the last thing you ought to think about, much less talk about. Pray to live and believe you are going to get out."Thi
  Thing (Ida addressing twelve black prisoners)g
• Brave woman! You have done your people and mine a service which can neither be weighed nor measured. If America's conscience were only half alive...a scream of horror, a shame, and indignation would rise to Heaven wherever your pamphlet shall be read.
  Thing(Frederick Douglass in the forward of her first pamphlet, Southern Horrors: Lynching Law in all its Phases)
• Thing"You go, my child. You are the one to go, for you have the story to tell."
  Thing (Helen Douglass encouraging to tour Europe)
• Thing"Our country remains silent on these continued outrages. It is to the religious and moral sentiment of Great Britain we turn. These can arouse the public sentiment of America so necessary for the enforcement of the law."
  Thing (Ida during her first trip abroad)
• Thing"Our American Christians are too busy saving the souls of white Christians from burning in hell-fire to save the black ones from present burning in fires kindled by white Christians."
• Thing"That is because you are an orator, and naturally you are concerned with the presentation of your address. With me it is different. I am only a mouthpiece through which to tell the story of lynching and I have told it so often that I know it by heart."
  Thing (Ida to Frederick Douglass when he asked her if she was nervous before giving a speech)
• Thing"I have found that motherhood was a profession by itself, just like school teaching and lecturing."
  Thing(Ida)
  
• Thing"The ballot is the right whch safeguards all our rights."
  Thing(Ida)
  
• Thing"She has taken this country like an earthquake. In the future she will be reverenced as the heroine of her race and vocabularies will be searched to write her praises in prose and poetry."
  (Friend Bishop Henry McNeal Turner of the AME Church on Ida)
• Thing"Tout pour l'humanite! Tout pour Dieu! Rien pour soi! "All for humanity! All for God! Nothing for herself!
  (Victor-Ernest Rillieux, French-speaking poet from New Orleans)
• Thing"Nowhere in the civilized world save the United States do men go in bands to hunt down, shoot, or burn to death an individual. Postmaster's killing is a federal matter, pure and simple. He died at his post the same as a soldier on a field of battle."
  (Ida before the president McKinley on the death of Postmater Baker)
• Thing"A flame of righteous indignation"
  (A writer of her time on Ida)
• Thing"If this gathering means anything, it is that we have at last come to a point where we must do something for ourselves--and do it now! We must educate the white people out of their tow hundred and fifty years of slavery history."
  (Ida after the Willmington riot in speech at National Afro-American Council in Washington, DC)
• Thing"Mother if you don't go, nobody else will!"
  (Son Charles convincing Ida that she could bring justice in a case)
• Thing"What is, or should be a woman...{a woman should be} a strong, bright, presence...with a sense of her mission on earth and a desire to fulfill it."
  (Ida in her article "Woman's Mission")
• Thing"Queen of our Race"

Side by side with the whites she walked,
Step after step the southerners balked,
But Illinois, fond of order and grace,
Stuck to the black Queen of our race.

'Tis true, they're able at this age to bar,
But justice will soon send the doors ajar
And sit the black and white face to face.
There will be seen the Queen of our race.

Page after page in history you'll read
Of one who was ready and able to lead,
Who set the nation on fire with her pace
And the Heroine will be the Queen of our race.

Thing(Poetess Bettiola H. Fortson commemorating Ida refusing to walk in the colored section of women's suffrage march)

• Thing"Yes, and the government deserves to be criticized. I think it was a dastardly thing to hang those men as if they were criminals and put them in holes criminals and put them in holes in the ground just as if they had been dead dogs. If it is treason for me to think and say so, then make the most of it. I'd rather go down in history as one lone Negro who dared to tell the government that it had done a dastardly thing than to save my skin by taking what I have said. I would consider it an honor to spend whatever years are necessary in prison."
  (Ida to Secret Service Agents)
• Thing"Our youth are entitled to the facts of race history which only the participants can give."
  (Ida to a young woman asking about her life)
• Thing"Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty"
  (Chapter title of in her autobiography)
• Thing"The only thing to offer for you in your great undertaking {is} prayer, and this goes up from every lip. The words GOD BLESS HER is written here on every acre of the ground, and on every doorstep, and inside of every home."
  ( A Mississippi sharecropper in a letter to Ida)