Black History Month is a time to pay tribute to leaders and role models in the Black community who have motivated and inspired many throughout history.

We asked faculty, staff and students at Fox Valley Technical College to share their favorite quotes from Black leaders and explain why their words are so important to them.

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Favorite quote from student Muhammad Abbas Princeton:

 "I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel."

— Maya Angelou
 

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Here's what Muhammad has to say about the meaning behind this quote:

This quote carried a heavy burden on my heart because of the way it made me look at the world as a whole. We have billionaires who are rich, but have no intention of giving back to a broken society such as our own. Everyone knows how to work, work, work.  But to many people, relationships don’t seem important to them because we live in a very intellectual society where everyone wants to say they own this company or that company.

Nobody notices or cares about how something felt to them. We easily forget that what we live in a society filled with violence, without love, and without our own communities unifying together as one to make life easier on all of us.

Humans have the ability to remember something forever if it is close to their heart or even if someone changed their life. Those are the moments that I live for, and you can be as rich as you want or as smart as you want, but this is what separates someone who is famous and this makes me put someone in the category of a legend, because it is not about the life you live. It is about what you do with it that counts, and I always keep this close to not only my heart, but in my head.