Quotes About Segregation

In 1963, Birmingham was often called the most segregated city in America.

Their objectives included the elimination of Birmingham's rigid segregation. They wanted the right to vote. They wanted jobs and the ability to try on clothes in all the places where they shopped. They wanted public schools opened to all children without regard to the color of their skin.

I had been fighting too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns.

I came to see that no one gives up his privileges without strong resistance. I saw further that the underlying purpose of segregation was to oppress and exploit the segregated, not simply to keep them apart. Justice and equality I saw, would never come while segregation remained, because the basic purpose of segragation was to perpetuate injustice and inequality.

It is disappointment with the Christian church that appears to be more white than Christian, and with many white clergymen who prefer to remain silent behind the security of stained-glass windows.

One old domestic, an influential matriarch to many young relatives in Montgomery, was asked by her wealthy employer, "Isn't this bus boycott terrible?" The old lady responded: "Yes, ma'am, it sure is. And I just told all my young'uns that this kind of thing is white folks' business and we just stay off the buses till they get this whole thing settled.

But they are balanced at the other end of the pole by the unregenerate segregationists who have declared that democracy is not worth having if it involves equality. The segregationist goal is the total reversal of all reforms, with reestablishment of naked oppression and if need be a native form of fascism.

The waitress was white, and the counter was white, and the ice cream I never ate in Washington, D. C. that summer I left childhood was white, and the white heat and the white pavement and the white stone monuments of my first Washington summer made me sick to my stomach for the whole rest of that trip and it wasn't much of a graduation present after all.

My father answered the door, and would not let Peter into the house because he was white.

U.S. history that while the nation fought its greatest war against the world's worst racist, it maintained a segregated army abroad and a total system of discrimination at home.

The United States fought Germany and Japan, racist societies, with a segregated army.

Sophia took a seat at the back with the other coloured folk. Alice nodded at her. It felt wrong that she wasn't sitting with them, another example of a world out of kilter.

Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed.

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.

Research experts want to know what can be done about the values of poor segregated children; and this is a question that needs asking. But they do not ask what can be done about the values of the people who have segregated these communities. There is no academic study of the pathological detachment of the very rich...

It shames me to admit that in the white-defined society in which I was raised, blacks were considered merely background. This was worse than physical segregation. This was psychological segregation. It wasn't that we were taught not to associate with blacks: close association was unavoidable. Instead, we were taught to see half the population not as individuals but as functionaries - maids, yardmen, etc.

Creation is filled with soul-sick folks, colored and white, never knowing where they belong. They tangle everybody else up in their grief.

If you end up doing nothing but praying we will be living in segregation two hundred or three hundred years from now … God will never allow prayer to become a substitute for working intelligence.

Instead of sitting down at lunch counters, Wallace vowed to stand in the entranceway to keep blacks out of the University of Alabama.

I'm opposed to segregation. It's basically antisocial and gives rise to the worst kind of sexism... When a boy or girl has been forced along the straight and narrow for an unnatural length of time, most of them rush headlong into unexplored territory at the first brush with freedom. I think it causes a lot of disillusion and unhappiness.

relations between Jews and non-Jews not only became worse almost immediately after 1933, but they continued to worsen over time.

In the end no segregationist scheme has withstood the force of a simple idea: equality under law.