First Hand History

"The violence of those years and the 50s had to do more with the younger people being very very much opposed to the war effort in Korea and Vietnam, and the Haight-Ashbury rise more had to do with people in poverty rather than race."

"Not only was I in the minority category of being a woman, according to our binary, gender-coded society. I was also Latina, so I was navigating that unique pressure. "

"I can relate to the students in our program because I am a first-generation college graduate."

"If you are willing to work hard, don't let anyone talk you out of going after what you want to do in life."

"If we can’t talk about it, if we can’t make it public, if we can’t kind of show how damaging it is, then we are not going to be able to stop it."

"Both the government and the rebels were fighting and when the two elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers. All the people in Northern Uganda suffered."

"To know that things can change and the heart of man can change – that’s what’s important."

"...You need to educate the children to treat everyone fairly, and to be kind to one another, and not single people out because of their skin color, or their religion, or their way of life, or anything of that sort."

"I learned in the field of social work not to measure my accomplishments by outcome but by process."

"So all of that makes me understand that I don't have anyone around me to protect me. I have to grow up, day by day, be a man and support my family. And it was hard, but I did it."

"I called Washington DC, talked to the head of our National Education Association, who was an expert on federal law. Within one week, we had full-day kindergarten for all the kids."

"Johnson O’Malley is a name that came from the Johnson O’Malley Act. It was designed to create federal aid systems for Native American tribes who experienced problems associated with poverty and dominant culture pressures dealing with having their tribal lands taken from them and being moved to reservations as part of the expansion of our population."

"You could see you were treated a little different... [Indians] were always looked as inferior to the whites. We had to work quite hard to prove ourselves."

"Nobody wanted to go to Vietnam, because they knew that if they went, they wouldn’t come back."

"The communist regime was one of the most cruel periods that a human being could endure. There was no right to express your feelings, to talk freely, or to be able to make your own decisions. There was no freedom, everything was abolished"

"I was reared with three boys, and I thought it was wrong to be a sissy and do some of the things girls were expected to do."

"DPN was our chant."

"If you can’t read, you can’t succeed."

"Actually, we didn’t question too much; we just assumed that that was the way things were."

"In the years leading up to the revolution, I knew that we had some relatives that had worked against the Shah. And several of them had been imprisoned. One of them was actually executed by the Shah’s government."

"I don't think God wanted me to be a cotton picker all my life..."

"Well I have been threatened many times. Gotten lots of strange letters. The Ku Klux Klan used to write to me when I was starting out. But I have never felt scared."

"Years ago, the students that are in my classroom would really be in institutions. We’ve come a long way."

"You can't like everyone, but you have to have a reason to dislike them."

"...you have an opportunity for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I held that very, very – and still do even to this day as a priest; I reinterpret it theologically, but I think even then, I would interpret with a sense that that was a right that all of us, regardless of color, or regardless of economic status, regardless of whether we were immigrants or not, we had this right."

"It wasn’t until I got older that I realized that segregation was probably not a good thing, that there needed to be a change."

"When I was in first grade, there was this girl that came from a very rich family, the richest girl in school, and made fun of me. I had a fight with her because she was teasing me, and I got kind of upset. The teacher told me to say sorry to her, and I didn’t."

"He said, ‘Go ahead and go tell somebody. They can’t do anything to me because I’m retiring this semester.’"

"My parents and my parent’s parents believe that someone who is highly educated can go on and make a good living, go to best college, and get a good job, and be respected in the society."

"I believe it was 1963 when someone went up to the Supreme Court and argued schools were just as segregated in the North as schools in the South. This was not officially recognized, and no one did anything about it."

"I was being treated unfairly."

"Racism is a social evil, which is based on discrimination, coming out from color, race, and this type of other distinctive features."

"The cycle was, you were born on the plantation, owned by the plantation, you work all your life, and when you have children, the same thing happens to them."

"The other people look at him and think, 'What is that parent and child doing and why are they doing it?'"

"I found out that they were just more curious about me than I was about them. They wanted to know, “Oh! Your skin! The color doesn’t come off!” I was shocked to hear someone say that. I was washing my face, I was in the bathroom, and everybody had sinks lined up against the wall, and they watched."

"I remember that when I was growing up in school or even at home, politics had been a taboo. People tried not to talk about politics or policy because that means anybody who expressed their unhappiness towards the government we would be in trouble."

"People were very poor back during that period time, and a lot of them worked in agricultural jobs raising cotton and corn and things like that. And the parents would often times pull their children out of school so that they could work and earn money."

"I think there are pretty much only advantages to integration with public schools so children can gain real world experience. It’s really great, and I can’t think of any disabilities to integration. "

"Instead of sending me to the nurse, she sent me to the office for speaking Spanish."

"My mother was on the school board at the time, and she helped to shape the integration of the schools in Austin."

"The realization came down upon me was that one's destiny was being decided at birth and it did not matter how hard you studied or how smart you were."

"I can’t fix a problem unless I really understand it and see it firsthand."

"It went like any other thing that is established for a good reason; it goes wacko, to the other side."

"When the school started, everybody was really hopeful about the state of the school and about the kind of opportunities that it would offer them."

"About eight years ago, my sister and I started an organization for undocumented students and for people who wanted to support the Dream Act here in the University of Texas."

"They don't just say, “Oh, this year were only going to let in 500 Asian people or 500 white people or 500 black people.” So it’s not a set number, but they definitely have some sort of proportion in mind."

"People who have got the chance through the Quota System will not do anything for their own people and try to seek their identity with the upper castes."

"Don't say I can't."

"Eventually, the teacher broke. She started crying, saying she was from California, where she was raised to look down on Hispanics, and then apologized profusely."

"One of the things we would teach the students is, for math problems we would say, "Show us two or three ways to get there," because that's the reality, there's not just one way to come up with the answer."

"Because school was so horrible for me, I was so humiliated and it was just so hard. And what I know now is it doesn’t have to be that way for other kids."