Quotes About African Americans

America is not perfect. It took a bloody civil war to free over 4 million African Americans who lived enslaved. It took another hundred years after that before they achieved full equality under the law.

The health of thirty million African Americans is continually imperiled, partly because many eschew effective care rather than risk the tender mercies of government-sponsored medicine. Although many studies and abuses contributed to this iatrophobia, Tuskegee remains the iconic symbol of racialized medical abuse.

Socially, segregation labeled African Americans as less than human; the term "boy" itself, applied to the Scottsboro defendants even as they became elderly, implied that they were less than men.

In Virginia, North Carolina, and Alabama, interracial coalitions briefly won statewide and would have won more often had elections been fair. African Americans still had the rights of citizenship -- at least formally -- until the 1890s.

Garrett County is hardly colder than Detroit -- hardly colder in 2002, for that matter, when I had the conversation, than it had been in 1890, when it had 185 African Americans. The fact that the very next county to the east had more than 1,000 African Americans, while Garrett County had at most one black household, is a dead giveaway. Such abrupt disparities can only result from different racial policies, not from factors such as climate.

In 1863 Lincoln desegregated the White House staff, which initiated a desegregation of the federal government that lasted until Woodrow Wilson. Lincoln opened the White House to black callers, notably Frederick Douglass. He also continued to wrestle with his own racism, asking aides to investigate the feasibility of deporting (euphemistically termed colonizing) African Americans to Africa or Latin America.

Recovering the memory of the increasing oppression of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century can deepen our understanding of the role racism has played in our society and continues to play today.

That being said, it's still not racist to observe that half of the homicides in America are committed by and against African Americans.

Garfield fought side by side with African Americans during the Civil War; and after the War, he worked side by side with America's first African American congressmen to pass those early civil rights bills.

James A. Garfield, America's 20th President, personally witnessed the final chapter in the deliverance of African Americans from slavery in America. He fought to abolish slavery as a Union General during the Civil War and afterwards as a Member of Congress, voted for the abolition of slavery and led in the passage of almost two dozen civil rights bills.

Unfortunately, a lot of Silicon Valley venture capitalists are disconnected from African Americans, Latinos, and other people of color.

I think there is a big difference between expressing the pain and anger that many African Americans and other people of color may feel versus language that I think now crosses the line and goes into hate.

It saddens me that African Americans - when they express their pain, when they protest about police violence, when they question inequality, when they raise issues of bondage and discrimination - African Americans are seen as not patriotic.

Goldwater objected to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on libertarian grounds; he did not believe the federal government was constitutionally authorized to regulate discrimination in the private sector. Sadly, Goldwater's principled stand was misunderstood by many African Americans, who saw Goldwater as a racist and his party, the GOP, as the party of racism.

Democrats in the 1880s invented segregation and Jim Crow laws that lasted through the 1960s. Democrats also came up with the "separate but equal" rationale that justified segregation and pretended that it was for the benefit of African Americans.

According to this complaint, which I was never allowed to see, I harassed African Americans and women to the point that they were unable to do their job.

I think African Americans are resilient and hustlers by nature. I think they need to understand that you can take that hustle to the boardroom, but it has to be an education process.

I was able to do To Sleep with Anger, a very powerful film about African Americans, their spirituality, and the things that happened within a small community and a family.

And when the time is right, I hope that African Americans will again look to the party of emancipation, civil liberty, and individual freedom.

As UCLA historian Sarah Haley notes, in earlier periods when the numbers of the confined were "only" in the tens of thousands, the prisons still concentrated, "massified," the lives of targeted groups, particularly African Americans in post-slavery U.S.A.

It is extremely rough to follow through with my goals, but I felt a responsibility to show the world what the African Americans are facing through this rough patch.

Further, more African Americans today are under criminal justice supervision—either in prison, on parole or probation—than were enslaved 10 years before the Civil War (Alexander 2012

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.

I think there is a big difference between expressing the pain and anger that many African Americans and other people of color may feel versus language that I think now crosses the line and goes into hate.