“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” … “I am enough of an artist to draw freely upon my imagination. Imagination is more important than knowledge.”
“There is separation of colored people from white people in the United States,” … “That separation is not a disease of colored people. It is a disease of white people. I do not intend to be quiet about it.”
~ Albert Einstein
From his speech to the NAACP at Lincoln University, alma mater of Langston Hughes and Thurgood Marshall, and the first school in America to grant college degrees to Blacks.
In 1931, Einstein accepted an invitation from the great African-American sociologist and NAACP co-founder W.E.B. Du Bois to submit a piece to his magazine The Crisis. Einstein took the opportunity to applaud civil rights efforts, but also to encourage African-Americans not to let racists drag down their self-worth. “This … more important aspect of the evil can be met through closer union and conscious educational enlightenment among the minority,” he wrote, “and so emancipation of the soul of the minority can be attained.”
Purposely left out of American History books, Einstein had close relationships with many African American leaders and civil rights activists. Einstein was very close friends WEB Dubois, Marian Anderson and especially Paul Robeson, who also lived in Princeton. Einstein worked closely with Robeson on the American Crusade to End Lynching, in response to an upsurge in racial murders as black soldiers returned home in the aftermath of World War II. Einstein served as co-chair of the ACEL organization. He invited Marian Anderson to stay at his home when the singer was refused a room at the Nassau Inn because of the color of her skin. Until his death, Einstein remained a very vocal civil rights activist and member of the NAACP.
Description of photos from left to right:
1.) Einstein Giving a Physics Lecture on Relativity to African American Students at Lincoln University
2.) Former Vice President Henry Wallace, Physicist Albert Einstein, Lewis L. Wallace of Princeton University, and African American actor and civil rights leader, Paul Robeson meeting in Princeton, New Jersey.
3.) Einstein receiving an honorary degree from African American Lincoln University President Horace Mann Bond, father of the late Julian Bond.”
