Quotes About African Americans

The challenge is more difficult because low-income African Americans today confront not only segregation but also the income stagnation and blocked mobility faced by all Americans in families with low or moderate incomes.

As in Rollingwood ten years earlier, one of the federal government's specifications for mortgages insured in Milpitas was an openly stated prohibition on sales to African Americans.

in a compromise that gave the Republican candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, the White House. In return for southern Democratic support of their presidential candidate, Republicans agreed to withdraw federal troops who had been protecting African Americans in the defeated Confederacy.

To ensure that no African Americans migrated to Richmond unless they were essential to the war effort, the city's police stopped African American men on the street and then arrested and jailed

in Rollingwood ten years earlier, one of the federal government's specifications for mortgages insured in Milpitas was an openly stated prohibition on sales to African Americans.

The full cycle went like this: when a neighborhood first integrated, property values increased because of African Americans' need to pay higher prices for homes than whites. But then property values fell once speculators had panicked enough white homeowners into selling at deep discounts.

Indeed, the study confirmed that because African Americans were willing to pay more than whites for similar housing, property values in neighborhoods where African Americans could purchase increased more often than they declined.

A Chicago Department of Public Welfare report in the mid-1920s stated that African Americans were charged about 20 percent more in rent than whites for similar dwellings. It also observed that in neighborhoods undergoing racial change, rents increased by 50 to 225 percent when African Americans occupied apartments that formerly housed whites. The limited supply of housing open to African Americans gave property owners in black neighborhoods the opportunity to make exorbitant profits.

We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies.

Denver, 1961. When a few African Americans moved to a middle-class white neighborhood, speculators panicked white homeowners into selling at a deep discount.

First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt protested to the president. The FWA again reversed course and assigned African Americans to the Sojourner Truth project. Whites in the neighborhood rioted, leading to one hundred arrests (all but three were African Americans) and thirty-eight hospitalizations (all but five were African Americans).

This shifting of terminology should not distract us from this underlying truth: We have created a caste system in this country, with African Americans kept exploited and geographically separate by racially explicit government policies. Although most of these policies are now off the books, they have never been remedied and their effects endure.

In 1866, Congress enforced the abolition of slavery by passing a Civil Rights Act, prohibiting actions that it deemed perpetuated the characteristics of slavery. Actions that made African Americans second-class citizens, such as racial discrimination in housing, were included in the ban.

In 1953, the Supreme Court ended this circumvention of Shelley . It ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment precluded state courts not only from evicting African Americans from homes purchased in defiance of a restrictive covenant but also from adjudicating suits to recover damages from property owners who made such sales. Still, the a Court refused to declare that such private contracts were unlawful or even that county clerks should be prohibited from accepting deeds that included them.

Parents' economic status is commonly replicated in the next generation, so once government prevented African Americans from fully participating in the mid-twentieth-century free labor market, depressed incomes became, for many, a multigenerational trait.

Frequently, the African Americans who attempted to pioneer the integration of white middle-class neighborhoods were of higher social status than their white neighbors, and they were rarely of lower status.

Desegregation would attempt to reverse a century of social engineering on the part of federal, state, and local governments that enacted policies to keep African Americans separate and subordinate. Too few whites were terribly concerned with that kind of social engineering, and it's a bit unseemly to make that objection now.

Congress enforced the abolition of slavery by passing a Civil Rights Act, prohibiting actions that it deemed perpetuated the characteristics of slavery. Actions that made African Americans second-class citizens, such as racial discrimination in housing, were included in the ban.

Just as Huckleberry Finn was published, the first generation of African Americans raised in the postslavery era began to come of age. Among them were people with musical talent, and at first they went to work in minstrelsy, in the well-worn patterns of show business they'd inherited.

The American cultural scales were teetering, with the stable orthodoxy of WASP assumptions being challenged by the unwashed hordes of immigrants, African Americans, and working-class people along with intellectual and aesthetic developments broadly known as "the modern." Ragtime would help tip the scales.

In the first years after the Revolutionary War, Baptist evangelicals in the South as well as throughout the country were deeply opposed to slavery. They believed that all were equal in the sight of God, criticized the categories of race and class, and embraced the cause of freedom for African Americans.

When you do a film, you know you're shooting for 6 or 9 weeks, you've got your cast and crew. Overall, no one can just pull the plug and say, 'This isn't working.' There's just no security on television, especially for African Americans. It's a tough market.

During the days of segregation, there was not a place of higher learning for African Americans. They were simply not welcome in many of the traditional schools. And from this backward policy grew the network of historical black colleges and universities.

Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It's that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated.