Quotes About Segregation

Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.

Growing up in Augusta in such a protected and loving community is something that I really enjoy talking about. I love talking about - even though I grew up, of course, in the time of segregated schools: Brown vs. Board of Education came along after I was already in first grade.

When the 14th Amendment, equal protection clause was enacted, the galleries in the Senate were segregated. Now we have integration.

We pay millions of pounds to separate Catholic and Protestant children, and even more millions on attempting to bring them together as adults. You can't make someone fear another person if they shared a desk for seven years.

Every day, I would show up, and there were no kids, just me and my teacher in my classroom. Every day, I would be escorted by marshals past a mob of people protesting and boycotting the school. This went on for a whole year.

I just know there's an albino living in the colored quarters. I can feel it in my bones.

Questa era Slagtown un sabato sera qualunque, e a un isolato da lì la Birmingham dei bianchi fingeva d'ignorarne l'esistenza.

L.A. is a town built upon segregated, individual fantasies.

My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.

I remember integrating the all-white Yazoo City High School after my Black school closed its doors. Teachers sprayed me with fire extinguishers, and I carried a stick to fend off attacks from fellow students.

When I was a child, it was segregated, and I couldn't go across a fence to certain parts of Gainesville.

The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor - all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.

In the Fifties, there were certain places we couldn't ride on the bus, and now there is a possibility of a black man being in the White House. You have to feel good about it.

Most whites live, grow, play, learn, love, work and die primarily in social and geographic racial segregation. Yet, our society does not teach us to see this as a loss. Pause for a moment and consider the magnitude of this message: We lose nothing of value by having no cross-racial relationships.

Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites.

I couldn't go to school with whites. Now there are schools that educate everyone.

I was about four years old the first time I ever saw what happened when you acted up to whites.

My protest about the post exchange seating bore some results. More seats were allocated for blacks, but there were still separate sections for blacks and for whites. At least I had made my men realize that something could be accomplished by speaking out, and I hoped they would be less resigned to unjust conditions.

I am not naive, and I do realize that racism is alive and well in the United States of America. I am also fully aware that when segregation ended, we didn't all live happily ever after. No one can convince me, however, that life in America would be better if blacks and whites had stayed separate and unequal.

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.

In a country that was still racially segregated and prejudiced, music was among the first domains in which African-Americans thrived alongside whites.

I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956, with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins - I was only 16 years old - we went down to the public library trying to check out some books, and we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors. It was a public library.

For me, personally, life in South Africa had come to an end. I had been lucky in some of the whites I had met. Meeting them had made a straight 'all-blacks-are-good, all-whites-are-bad' attitude impossible. But I had reached a point where the gestures of even my friends among the whites were suspect, so I had to go or be forever lost.

Growing up in Georgia, it was sort of the last place to jump on the bandwagon of the integrated frontier. I have aunts and uncles and grandparents that experienced the 'whites only' and segregated schools.