Political Quotes

“Good morning and happy Black History Month. Black history is American history, so I rise today to give a history lesson. I think, at moments of inflection for our country, history provides a critical contextualizing. In order to go forward, we need to look back, especially when the White House is working overtime, as laid out in their playbook, Project 2025, to ban our history and to dismantle our Department of Education. Let's start at the beginning. Why did we establish a Federal Department of Education? In the early days of this Nation, education was left entirely to the States, and schools were run by a patchwork of religious schools and one-room schoolhouses, leaving many children excluded based on their race, gender, or poverty. Madam Speaker, there is much I disagree with our Founding Fathers on, but they knew that preserving democracy required an educated population, one that could participate in civic issues, understand social and political issues, vote, and resist tyrants. In the late 1700s and early 1800s, the concept of free public education began to take hold, but not for everyone. Enslavement ruled the day. Black and Native American families faced State-sponsored violence and systemic exclusion from education. In the 1830s, it was the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and a legislator named Horace Mann who established the common school movement, pushing to extend free public education to poor and middle- class children.…”