Quotes About Segregation

Our pop cultural likes and dislikes are still very segregated, and that is not true of 'Billy on the Street.'

This nation is being divided into black and white, and the present system encourages this.

When we had segregated schools and when we had a time when, you know, girls weren't allowed to have the same kind of sports teams - I mean, there have been important inflection points for the federal government to get involved in some of the areas around protecting students and ensuring safe environments for them - there is a role to play.

I grew up in the once segregated South. I experienced forced integration during my formative school years. I lived the sacrifices, burdens, and tears. I also lived the moments of understanding, of acknowledgment, of fellowship and success. I saw my parents and grandparents coming home beaten down - and some of my friends beaten up.

The Negro will disappear from the field of national politics...Henceforth the nation, as a nation, will have nothing more to do with him. (The Nation, progressive periodical of our day, published demeaning, racist opinions of Black Americans during Reconstruction (ie pg. 854 softcover)

Englishmen do love to bury one thing so completely in another that the two can only be separated by force: peanuts in candy, indigo in glass, Africans in irons.

The structure of apartheid is still rooted in the Haitian society. When you have apartheid, you don't see those behind the walls. That is the reality of Haiti.

Jim Crow was king... and I heard a game in which Jackie Robinson was playing, and I felt pride in being alive

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.

Southern politics since World War II has not been normal. The key political institutions of the South were swept away with the end of de jure segregation. The essential rationale for the peculiar politics of the solid South had been to disfranchise and disempower black voters, and institutions created to limit black participation did so with remarkable effectiveness. As late as March 1965, only 7% of eligible black voters in Mississippi were registered.

Partly as a result of the president's inaction, by 1956 nearly every southern state had enacted legislation that declared the Brown ruling null and void.

The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.

The eleven o'clock hour on Sunday is the most segregated hour in American life.

Thirteen million new homes were built in the United States during the 1950s; eleven million of them were built in the suburbs. Eighty-three percent of all population growth in the 1950s took place in the suburbs. For every two blacks who moved to the cities, three whites moved out. The postwar racial order created a segregated landscape: black cities, white suburbs

Cities and counties in the North and West passed racial zoning laws, banning blacks from the middle-class communities. In 1890, in Montana, blacks lived in all fifty-six counties in the state; by 1930, they'd been confined to just eleven.

The majority in Plessy v. Ferguson asserted that separation and equality were wholly separate ideas. "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

Since antiquity, men have defined themselves by those who are excluded.

For a very long time, white evangelicalism has been simply wrong on the issue of race. Indeed, conservative white Christians have served as a bastion of racial segregation and a bulwark against racial justice efforts for decades, in the South and throughout the country. During the civil rights struggle, the vast majority of white evangelicals and their churches were on the wrong side—the wrong side of the truth, the Bible, and the gospel.

The white pastors who opposed the civil rights movement, and even those who ignored it, were indeed disobeying Paul's theological proclamation that, in Christ, there is no Jew or Gentile, slave or free, male or female; but all are one in Christ Jesus.

Mrs. Hedges, I believe you're prejudiced. I didn't know you were that human.' 'I ain't prejudiced,' she said firmly. 'I just ain't got no use for white folks. I don't want 'em anywhere near me. I don't even wanta have to look at 'em. I put up with you because you don't ever stop to think whether folks are white or black and you don't really care. That sort of takes you out of the white folks class.

Listen, Junto,' he said. 'They can wave flags. They can tell me the Germans cut off baby's behinds and rape women and turn black men into slaves. They can tell me any damn thing. None of it means nothing.' 'Why?' 'Because, no matter how scared they are of Germans, they're still more scared of me. I'm black, see? And they hate Germans, but they hate me worse. If that wasn't so they wouldn't have a separate army for black men.

This was, by comparison, a safe, secure, clean world. And looking at it, she thought it must be rather pleasant to be able to live anywhere you wanted to, just so you could pay the rent, instead of having to find out first whether it was a place where colored people were permitted to live.

I feel like my work has been my path to freedom from having grown up in a segregated environment.

I don't like to mix my personal and professional life. Both are different, and I don't mix it.