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Quotes About Segregation

To define each other according to our superficial characteristics and then divide us and hire us and then separate us is nothing short of modern day segregation and modern day racism.
~ Will Cain
Now, aware of my invisibility, I live rent-free in a building rented strictly to whites, in a section of the basement that was shut off and forgotten during the nineteenth century, which I discovered when I was trying to escape in the night from Ras the Destroyer. But that's getting too far ahead of the story, almost to the end, although the end is in the beginning and lies far ahead.
~ Ralph Ellison
How could you treat a Negro as equal in war and then deny him equality during times of
~ Ralph Ellison
The Supreme Court was not and never will be perfect. Some of the most heinous, morally reprehensible, logically flawed decisions have emanated from the Supreme Court. To imbue it with infallibility is to say that, when it upheld slave catching or when it upheld racial segregation, it was right.
~ Daniel Miller
Segregating Americans into identity groups—the very essence of bigotry—has been fully embraced by modern progressivism, which has absolutely nothing to do with classical liberalism
~ Dave Rubin
Hiram Wesley Evans
~ David Beasley
Tattnall from 1937 to 1941 shows no white bodies were donated for cadaver use during those five years while fifty-three black corpses were taken. Racial discrimination seemed to have no end, even after death.
~ David Beasley
When the South has trouble with its Negroes when the Negroes refuse to remain in their "place" it blames "outside agitators" and "Northern interference." When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.
~ James Baldwin
Suffering naturally gives rise to doubt. How can one believe in God in the face of such horrendous suffering as slavery, segregation, and the lynching tree? Under these circumstances, doubt is not a denial but an integral part of faith. It keeps faith from being sure of itself. But doubt does not have the final word. The final word is faith giving rise to hope.
~ James H. Cone
There was nothing benign about segregation, nothing accidental.
~ James Richardson
The Milliken decision was pivotal in the postwar history of race relations, for it badly hurt whatever hopes reformers still maintained of overturning de facto segregation of the schools and of slowing a dynamic that was accelerating in many American urban areas: "white flight" of familes to suburbs.69 Flight in turn eroded urban tax bases, further damaging schools and other services in the cities.
~ James T. Patterson
It then became obvious that ethnic differences (like class distinctions) refused to boil away. Even fairly well established groups, such as Irish-Americans, often nursed old resentments and clung to neighborhood enclaves.
~ James T. Patterson
Snobbery here raised its hideous head and marooned her on a permanent island of loneliness.
~ Agatha Christie
While African Americans had long played important roles in civic life, while the docks had seen the progress of the Negro Longshoreman's Union, and while all kinds of people mingled in the city streets, much of Galveston's social and political life had long involved rigid racial segregation.
~ Al Roker
School divides life into two segments, which are increasingly of comparable length. As much as anything else, schooling implies custodial care for persons who are declared undesirable elsewhere by the simple fact that a school has been built to serve them.
~ Ivan Illich
Antoine 'Fats' Domino was a 1950s rock n' roll pioneer, a larger-than-life New Orleans figure, and a role model for the African-American community in a time of deep segregation.
~ Elizabeth Flock
This idea of walls, segregation, labels, and 'You against us' and 'We are superior and you are inferior.' Which people are legitimate? Which relationships are legitimate or not? Who declares that under which authority? These are things that are hugely important.
~ Sebastian Lelio
It's what the people wanted at the time, but the country could not be half-segregated and half-integrated, just as it could not be half-slave and half-free back in the 1800s.
~ George Wallace
I am an opponent of war and of war preparations and an opponent of universal military training and conscription; but entirely apart from that issue, I hold that segregation in any part of the body politic is an act of slavery and an act of war.
~ Bayard Rustin
Contact is the best medicine against hate, racism and prejudice. It's something that we should be very wary of, the more segregation we have, the more of a problem that's going to be.
~ Rutger Bregman
Washington, D.C. in 1942 was not the easiest place in the world for a Negro to get along.
~ Gordon Parks
We claim reserved seats if accompanied by adult suffrage,' stated Ambedkar, 'but in the absence of adult suffrage we want separate electorates.
~ Ramachandra Guha
When America liked it? When Cuba was racially segregated? When education was only available to a privileged few? When the poor died of easily curable ailments? When vice was rampant? Had they preferred Batista's mafia-infested Cuba? Or the Cuba between the state that Teddy Roosevelt preened to subjugate and Franklin Delano Roosevelt worked to keep?
~ Randall Robinson
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.
~ Ray Stannard Baker