Although Alternative Breaks are a lot of meaningful work that requires energy and focus, that doesn’t mean there isn’t time to relax, explore the city, and have fun. I found that many of the places I visited in my off time only reinforced the ideas I learned about during my service. Whether that be on quotes I saw at various memorials and monuments, or specific historic events I continued to read up on in the museums we visited, I left Washington DC with a social justice outlook that extended beyond just the direct service that we took part in. Here are some quotes I found in various parts of DC that I want to take some time to reflect on to remember to good of this trip.
National Museum of African American History and Culture
“We’ve got to tell the unvarnished truth.” -John Hope Franklin
“All men are created equal…with certain unalienable rights…whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it.” -The Declaration of Independence
“Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.” -Martin Luther King Jr
“America…needs citizens who love it enough to re-imagine and re-make it.” -Cornel West
“One cannot truly understand America without understanding the historical experience of black people in this nation. Simply put, to get to the heart of this country one must examine its racial soul.” -Eric Holder
“History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” -Maya Angelou
Martin Luther King Jr Memorial
“I oppose the War in Vietnam because I love America. I speak out against it not in anger but with anxiety and sorrow in my heart. And above all with a passionate desire to see our beloved country stand as a moral example of the world.”
“We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bend toward justice.”
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”
“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality, and freedom for their spirits.”
“It is not enough to say, ‘we must not wage war.’ It is necessary to love peace and sacrifice for it. We must concentrate not merely on the negative expulsion of war, but on the positive affirmation of peace.”
“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moment of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”
“True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.”
FDR Memorial
“Man and nature must work hand in hand. The throwing out of balance of the resources of nature throws out of balance also the lives of men.”
“The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much, it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.”
“We must scrupulously guard the civil rights and civil liberties of all citizens, whatever their background. We must remember that any oppression, any injustice, any hatred is a wedge designed to attack our civilization.”
“We have faith that future generations will know that here, in the middle of the twentieth century, there came a times when men of good will found a way to unite, and produce, and fight to destroy the forces of ignorance, and intolerance, and slavery, and war.”
Library of Congress
“There is one only good namely knowledge and one only evil namely ignorance.”
“The foundation of every state is the education of its youth.”
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