Quotes from Richard Kluger

The cost of contemplating history is often an uneasy conscience.

We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff's argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.

Its dominant voice belonged to the seventy-three-year-old Pennsylvanian Thaddeus Stevens, a founder of the Republican Party, who declared that America did not stand for "white man's government" and to say as much was "political blasphemy, for it violates the fundamental principles of our gospel of liberty. This is man's government; the government of all men alike.

The Bible, Shakespeare, Milton, Melville—the masters of the King's English all promoted the easy imagery of black as vile and white as purity and thereby fed a deep and potent racism that well served all who would enslave the black men of Africa.

White Americans cannot deny their long history of abusive transactions with people of color. These offenses, it should be noted out of fairness, can be explained in part by the fact that no other sizable national state has ever been formed from the confluence of so many diverse ethnic streams. All our heterogeneous ferment no doubt made contentiousness inevitable.

Still, it had been a triumphal six-week tour. The nervy, smooth-talking governor had dispossessed the natives of 20,000 square miles without firing a shot. In return, the Indians were given nine reservations totaling about 93 square miles and promised $300,000 in hardware over the next two decades and a few vocational services. The U.S. government was subject to no penalties if it welshed on any of its promises.

It is time for South Carolina to rejoin the Union. It is time to fall in step with the other states and to adopt the American way of conducting elections.… Racial distinctions cannot exist in the machinery that selects the officers and lawmakers of the United States.

There is absolutely no reasonable explanation for racial prejudice. It is all caused by unreasoning emotional reactions and these are gained in early childhood. Let the little child's mind be poisoned by prejudice of this kind and it is practically impossible to remove these impressions, however many years he may have of teaching by philosophers, religious leaders or patriotic citizens. If segregation is wrong, then the place to stop it is in the first grade and not in graduate colleges.

By far the most important psychological and political part of the Hayes compromise package, of course, was the withdrawal of all federal troops from the South. It was far better, said the new President, for the white man and the black man of the South to make their peace together than to live in constant tension under the surveillance of a federal garrison.

That act, on December 7, 1787, is perhaps Delaware's sole claim to distinction as a champion of democracy. Certainly it was long hostile to the Negro, probably longer and more defiantly so than any other state outside of the Confederacy.

Among other targets of protest was the infuriating Red Cross practice of separating Negro from white contributions to blood banks for the aid of wounded servicemen—a division made all the more distasteful by the fact that the plasma-preserving process that made blood banks practical had been largely developed by a Negro, Dr. Charles Drew of Howard University.

No better example of the price of economic dependency may be culled from U.S. history than the sustained erosion of the African American's civil rights.

His way to wisdom was to hear out others who might or might not know any more than he did and then to sift it all through his own mental strainer.

The essence of this detrimental effect is a confusion in the child's concept of his own self-esteem—basic feelings of inferiority, conflict, confusion in his self-image, resentment, hostility towards himself, hostility towards whites, intensification of Ã¢â'¬Â¦ a desire to resolve his basic conflict by sometimes escaping or withdrawing.

Scholars have estimated that by 1850, the aboriginal population in North America—besieged by the invaders' explosive weaponry, wondrous technology, contemptuous cruelty, and irresistible pathogens, as well as the Indians' own ever-deepening despair—was just one-tenth of what it had been when Columbus first ventured ashore.

Americans, from the beginning and throughout much of their history, were a warrior people when dealing with those who stood in their path.

The most important thing now, as fast as conditions are changing, is that no Negro tolerate any ceiling on his ambitions or imagination. Good luck and don't have any doubts; you haven't time for such foolishness.

The law of the land is supposed to be obeyed.

Output had fallen to about half that figure in the last years of the Red empire, causing a cigarette shortage so severe that Soviet ruler Mikhail Gorbachev was forced to stave off rioting by emergency bulk purchases from foreign manufacturers—20 billion units from Philip Morris was the largest single order—paid for with Russian oil, gold, and diamonds.

In the twenty years following the Supreme Court's decision in the Civil Rights Cases, 3,000 lynchings occurred.

In Clarendon County for the school year 1949-50, they spent $179 per white child in the public schools; for each black child, they spent $43.

Yet only a little more than $5 million—$1.25 per capita—was spent to compensate for 200 years of ignorance enforced on a whole transplanted people.

His liberators were leaving the freedman to wither on the vine.

Public washrooms and water fountains were rigidly demarcated to prevent contaminating contact with the same people who cooked the white South's meals, cleaned its houses, and tended its children.