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Quotes About Segregation

In America, music was the first sphere of social interaction in which racial barriers were challenged and overturned. And the challenge went both ways: by the mid-1920s, white bands were playing for all-black audiences at Lincoln Theater and elsewhere. These intermediate steps between segregation and integration represented, for all their problems, progress of sorts.
~ Ted Gioia
fissiparous
~ Ted Widmer
My mother was from Mississippi, or is from 'Mississippi;' my father was from Alabama. He speaks about conditions in Mississippi and Alabama. They were really the poster children for the bad public laws that segregated, according to race, in our country.
~ Faye Wattleton
New York isn't segregated the way many American cities are, where there are specific ethnic neighborhoods that don't necessarily co-exist, or they co-exist but in a much separate sense.
~ Mike D
There were a couple Aborigines in my primary school, but we never spoke to them. They kept to themselves, and we never really even locked eyes. They weren't acknowledged officially either.
~ Phillip Noyce
When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal. And it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.
~ Natasha Trethewey
The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.
~ Ida B. Wells
It would bring tears in your eyes to make you think of all those years, the type of brain-washing that this man will use in America to keep us separated from our own people.
~ Fannie Lou Hamer
The only possible way out for the white man is to give us Negroes some land of our own; let us get out, get away from his wicked reign and go for ourselves.
~ Malcolm X
bimbo boxes with license plates from all the Burbclaves.
~ Neal Stephenson
This, Irene told her, was the year 1927 in the city of New York, and hundreds of white people of Hugh Wentworth's type came to affairs in Harlem, more all the time. So many that Brian had said: "Pretty soon the colored people won't be allowed in at all, or will have to sit in Jim Crowed sections.
~ Nella Larsen
We should not forget that in the '60s, George Wallace's motto was 'segregation forever,' and that he did nothing to deter bombings and other acts of violence and, by his actions, condoned them.
~ Coretta Scott King
I grew up in Varanasi where there would be a communal riot every other week. Then I moved to Aligarh, where the Muslims made me feel completely at home. They never made me feel different, so when did this business of 'them' and 'us' start?
~ Anubhav Sinha
The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December 1955, and by 1956 NAACP leaders came to me and asked me to be part of a lawsuit they wanted to file on my behalf and that of three other women, to challenge segregation on public buses.
~ Claudette Colvin
That box there. The empty one. Separate the Jews born in France from those born elsewhere. We are only interested in foreign-born Jews. Men, women, and children." "Why?" "They're Jews. Who cares? Now get to work.
~ Kristin Hannah
For years I have lived with words and terms that divide people, words that mark who is to be exterminated and who is to be spared.
~ Laksmi Pamuntjak
The long fuse leading up to the L.A. riots was the history of housing segregation, outsourcing of manufacturing jobs, and federal stripping of public programs, which is why I was upset that the media conveniently scapegoated Korean merchants as the source of black rage despite the fact that those merchants were barely above destitution.
~ Cathy Park Hong
In modern consumer society, the attack on mother-child eroticism took its total form; breastfeeding was proscribed and the breasts reserved for the husband's fetishistic delectation. At the same time, babies were segregated, put into cold beds alone and not picked up if they cried.
~ Germaine Greer
living in India had made me aware of how segregated my own country was. But only Mrs. Greene made me understand the parallels between race and caste—and how women's bodies were used to perpetuate both. Different prisons. Same key.
~ Gloria Steinem
The workers, as a class, are being more and more segregated by their economic masters; and this process, with its jamming and overcrowding, tends not so much toward immorality as unmorality.
~ Jack London
The question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That's what segregation means. You don't know what's happening on the other side of the wall, because you don't want to know.
~ James Baldwin
This innocent country set you down in a ghetto in which, in fact, it intended that you should perish.
~ James Baldwin
The projects in Harlem are hated. They are hated almost as much as policemen, and this is saying a great deal. And they are hated for the same reason: both reveal, unbearably, the real attitude of the white world, no matter how many liberal speeches are made, no matter how many lofty editorials are written, no matter how many civil-rights commissions are set up.
~ James Baldwin
The people in Harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else. No amount of "improvement" can sweeten this fact. Whatever money is now being earmarked to improve this, or any other ghetto, might as well be burnt. A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.
~ James Baldwin