On a day when people are celebrating love, we’re also celebrating Black Futures Month. To bring love into our movements today, we’re sharing some teaching and wisdom from Black leaders and ancestors who inspire us.

As you read these quotes, consider how love can be an antidote to fear, how it brings us closer to each other. There are real efforts to divide us and make us afraid of each other, but we’re choosing to focus on love and loving each other instead.

"Love takes off the masks we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within."

James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time

"When we are loving, we openly and honestly express care, affection, responsibility, respect, commitment, and trust."

bell hooks, All About Love: New Visions

"If the goal was to increase the love, rather than winning or dominating a constant opponent, I think we could actually imagine liberation from constant oppression. We would suddenly be seeing everything we do, everyone we meet, not through the tactical eyes of war, but through eyes of love. We would see that there's no such thing as a blank canvas, an empty land or a new idea - but everywhere there is complex, ancient, fertile ground full of potential.”

adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds

"Love happened. Love came to show you that you could be more than you could ever imagine, because love forced you out of the narrows of yourself and thrust you into a vastness that stretched from one end of time to the other. Nothing mattered except being in the presence of love, the greatest beauty of all." 

Julius Lester, Cupid: A Tale of Love and Desire