Quotes About African Americans

Although African Americans toiling in the field might be seen as the quintessential image of slavery, the more potent symbol of the system was the auction block.

1857 Dred Scott decision, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that African Americans were not guaranteed rights as citizens and that slave status could not be outlawed by any state government.

However, it was also the mounting discontent among Africn Americans, feminists, and gay activists that challenged the widespread acceptance and commercial exploitation of the governing beauty ideals.

The large ensemble cast and the fact that it was being shot in New York, combined with a lot of strong positive images as far as African Americans are concerned, really turned me on to The Best Man.

They are trying to lock up as many of us up as possible to put us in penitentiaries for free labor. You have the government paying private prisons to feed and clothe each inmate, turning it into a damn business. And African Americans are set up for getting arrested.

We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here. Our failure to confront the historical truth about how African Americans finally won their freedom presents a major obstacle to genuine racial reconciliation.

Black gains, it was assumed, could come only at the expense of whites.21 Not surprisingly, polls showed that as African Americans achieved greater access to their citizenship rights, white discomfort and unease mounted.

The Second Amendment is so inherently, structurally flawed, so based on Black exclusion and debasement, that, unlike the other amendments, it can never be a pathway to civil and human rights for 47.5 million African Americans.

Comprising 13 percent of the electorate, African Americans stood as the firewall between a democracy continuing to evolve and one threatened by the corrosion of a Trump presidency tainted with the "drip, drip, drip of scandal," ethics violations, foreign intrigue, and authoritarianism.

Nor did Johnson's policies or the Black Codes ensure that African Americans would not be a "burden upon society." If anything, they guaranteed the opposite. Blacks were denied access to land, banned from hunting and fishing, and forbidden to work independently using skills honed and developed while enslaved, such as blacksmithing. Under such conditions, self-sufficiency could never have been achieved.

Each of these—restricting felons from possessing guns, while also allowing a greater flow in urban areas for "protection" against crime, and forbidding firearms in public housing—had at its center the argument of "safety" and "security." But they had something else in common, too: African Americans were always the ones who posed the threat and always the ones who bore the brunt of the decision.

Similarly, the amendments covering the criminal justice system—the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth—have offered little to no protection for African Americans because of numerous Supreme Court decisions that have embedded racism and racial profiling into policing, trial procedures, and sentencing.

Every state admitted to the Union since 1819, starting with Maine, embedded in their constitutions discrimination against blacks, especially the denial of the right to vote. In addition, only Massachusetts did not exclude African Americans from juries; and many states, from California to Ohio, prohibited blacks from testifying in court against someone who was white.

We have a long, ugly history of white supremacy in this country, ranging from Jim Crow laws to keep African Americans down to the 1924 Immigration Act to keep non-Europeans out.

The large ensemble cast and the fact that it was being shot in New York, combined with a lot of strong positive images as far as African Americans are concerned, really turned me on to The Best Man.

For people of color - especially African Americans - the idea that racist cops might frame members of their community is no abstract notion, let alone an exercise in irrational conspiracy theorizing. Rather, it speaks to a social reality about which blacks are acutely aware.

The Harriet Tubman Home became the only charity outside New York City dedicated to the shelter and care of African Americans in the state. The main brick building, John Brown Hall, also known as the John Brown Infirmary

Police departments, since the start of the history of this country, have been used to enforce unconstitutional laws that were designed to discriminate against communities of color and particularly African Americans.

Since 1957, black people have experienced double-digit unemployment - in good times and bad times. Look at the population of African Americans in prison. They represent more than half the population of prisoners in the country, 55 percent of those on death row.

Really, the potential for, first of all, any college graduate today is enormously good. These are good times for anyone with a college degree today, particularly African Americans. With a college degree today, you really breach the unemployment rate.

For the first time in twenty-five years there was no Person of Color on the Board of Estimate, whatever traditional roles they'd had in City government erased. Squeezed by growing immigration, the breakdown of old political networks, a changing economy and soon, waves of drugs, crime, and disease, New York's African Americans would be forced over the next thirty-five years into new cultural and social strategies that would in turn change the world.

It is interesting that a guy like W.E.B. Du Bois, who actually did very little, I should imagine, with his hands, wrote about I am the smoke king. Without the labor, both free and slave, of African Americans this country would still be a wilderness.

While he was in the service, in the South and in Oklahoma, he was refused service at a couple of places where he was in uniform, and was told that African Americans, blacks, Negros, were not served. And in spite of that, I've never known a man who loved this country more than my father did.

African Americans are concerned about the scourge of abortion in their community, and respond to related facts and figures. Large majorities agree that every life should have a chance, regardless of race, socioeconomic status or circumstance.