Quotes About Jim Crow

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

The injustices endured by black Americans at the hands of their own government have no parallel in our history, not only during the period of slavery but also in the Jim Crow era that followed.

It was the biggest suppression of voting rights in our country's history since Jim Crow. And the thread of race runs from the beginning to the end of my book.

The history of African-American repression in this country rose from government-sanctioned racism. Jim Crow laws were a product of bigoted state and local governments.

One of the more important books on American race relations of the past decade or more is Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow, published in 2010.

The plunder of black communities is not a bump along the road, but it is, in fact, the road itself that you can't have in America without enslavement, without Jim Crow, terrorism, everything that came after that.

The stances of white churches on the issue of integration were seen by civil rights activists and segregationists alike as the keystone holding the entire Jim Crow edifice together.

Even as Jim Crow laws have been struck from the books in the political realm, most white Christian churches have reformed very little of their nineteenth-century theology and practice, which was designed, by necessity, to coexist comfortably with slavery and segregation. As a result, most white Christian churches continue to serve, consciously or not, as the mechanisms for transmitting and reinforcing white supremacist attitudes among new generations.

A fatherless boy raised in Jim Crow Texas, my dad was a tenacious autodidact, the first in his family to get a college degree.

With a lock on the racist mob vote, Democratic politicians won elections and promptly resegregated the entire South with Jim Crow laws. In 1913, Progressive Democrat president Woodrow Wilson even instituted segregation in Washington, D.C., bringing Jim Crow to the federal workforce.

The rule was historically used as a tool of subjugation. If a society was going to keep blacks and whites "separate but equal" as declared by the infamous Jim Crow laws in the segregated South and antimiscegenation laws (which barred interracial marriages) that at one point existed in thirty-eight states across the country, then rules were needed to determine who would fall on each side of the stark line dividing privilege from oppression.

You know if we were to look back and how we were in 1955 living in Jim Crow, living in segregation, living in segregated schools, it's hard to believe that it was America, but it really was.

History is a sly boots, and for a generation of blacks that cannot identify with the frustrations of Jim Crow, and for whites who cannot understand the hard deal that faces working-class blacks, it is difficult to reconcile Hughes's reputation as a poet-hero with his topical verse and uncomplicated prose.

I am prepared to oppose a Jim Crow army till I rot in jail.

It may be said of the Reconstruction era that the southern aristocracy took the world and gave the poor white man Jim Crow. He gave him Jim Crow. And when his stomach cried out for the food that his empty pockets could not provide, he ate Jim Crow, a psychological bird that told him that no matter how bad off he was, at least he was a white man, better than the black man.

How appealing to common interests discounted the continuing effects of discrimination and allowed whites to avoid taking the full measure of the legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and their own racial attitudes. How this left Black people with a psychic burden, expected as they were to constantly swallow legitimate anger and frustration in the name of some far-off ideal.

For the next fifty years the filibuster was used only sparingly—most notably by southern Democrats attempting to block anti-lynching and fair-employment bills or other legislation that threatened to shake up Jim Crow.

Liberalism and their ideas have done more to kill black folks whom they claim so much to love than the Ku Klux Klan, lynching and slavery and Jim Crow ever did, now that's a fact.

Time begins the healing process of wounds cut deeply by oppression. We soothe ourselves with the salve of attempted indifference, accepting the false pattern set up by the horrible restriction of Jim Crow laws.

Evil is everywhere. But to believe that this is a country that resembles the Jim Crow-era is ludicrous and disingenuous.

Barry Goldwater's opposition to the Civil Rights Act, which made Jim Crow voter-suppression laws illegal, was the defining moment for the modern Republican Party.

Everywhere he looked there were "Whites Only" signs. Blacks could not go into many hotels, restaurants, and stores. Blacks could not even drink out of the same water fountains as whites. In many cities, blacks had to ride in the back of a bus. If they tried to sit in the front, they were thrown in jail. And if black people wanted to go to a movie theater, they had to sit way up in the balcony. These rules were called Jim Crow laws.

The strength of my mother is something I didn't pay attention to for so long. Here she was, this single mom, who was part of the Great Migration, who was part of a Jim Crow south, who said, 'I'm getting my kids out of here. I'm creating opportunities for these young people by any means necessary.'

Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn't get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freedom we had.