Quotes About Equality

Standing still is never an option so long as inequities remain embedded in the very fabric of the culture.

Ignorance of how we are shaped racially is the first sign of privilege. In other words. It is a privilege to ignore the consequences of race in America.

In other words, government had always been big for people like us, and we were fine with that. But beginning in the 1960s, as people of color began to gain access to the benefits for which we had always been eligible, suddenly we discovered our inner libertarian and decided that government intervention was bad

Chicago activist Saul Alinsky sardonically defined integration as "the period of time between the arrival of the first black and the departure of the last white.

So here is another shard of truth, which we must accept if we are to make sense of the trial: faith in our courts and our laws, in the statement chiseled above the columns of the U.S. Supreme Court building - 'Equal Justice Under Law' - can obscure the obvious, particularly with the passage of time. There was no equal justice, no universal protection of law in the Mississippi Delta, certainly not in 1955.

That we not become prejudiced against those are prejudiced, or whose prejudices. May no be our own.

Lord you gave your only son to remedy a condition, but who knows but what the death of my only son might bring an end to lynching.

Rather than arrest the assailant, white police officers hauled off a black bystander who objected to their inaction.

If we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't."13

Milam and Bryant were not on a political mission when they pounded on Moses Wright's door, and they did not kidnap Emmett Till beneath the banner of states' rights, racial integrity, or white supremacy. The white men carried out their brutal errand in an atmosphere created by the Citizens' Councils, the Ku Klux Klan, and the mass of white public opinion, all of which demanded that African Americans remain the subservient mudsill of Mississippi—or die.

The murder of Emmett Till was reported in one of the very first banner headlines of the civil rights era and launched the national coalition that fueled the modern civil rights movement.

The so-called war on drugs successfully targets young African American men, even though blacks and whites use and sell illicit drugs at roughly the same rate.

People everywhere are joining to fight because of the way Emmett Till died—but also because of the way he was forced to live.

Emmett did not have to go to Mississippi to learn that white folks could take offense even at the presence of a black child, let alone one who violated local customs.

It is not Russia that threatens the United States so much as Mississippi," the NAACP declared in a 1947 petition to the United Nations. The petition, which decried "the denial of human rights to minorities in the case of citizens of Negro descent in the United States," created an "international sensation

Because if we in America have reached the point in our desperate culture where we must murder children, no matter for what reason or what color, we don't deserve to survive and probably won't."30

And it is no surprise that J. W. Milam and Roy Bryant would assume they could murder Emmett Till without

There was no point in trying to compensate for the crimes of the past, but "the nearest approach to justice to the negro for the past is to do him justice in the present."19 That meant integrating schools and ending legal barriers to employment and property ownership.

Women would then need to resort to the ballot box to request that protection—assuming the majority sees fit to give them the right/privilege to vote.

Noble as the ideas of the Declaration of Independence were, it was obvious before the ink was dry that they clashed with a central fact of everyday life in America: slavery.

Attacks on the principles of the Declaration began at an early point in American history. In the four decades before the Civil War, defenders of slavery explicitly rejected it, even calling it, as Senator John Pettit did in 1854, "a self-evident lie."63 Horrified by this, antislavery politicians rallied to the Declaration. They developed a constitutional interpretation that emphasized liberty and equality, and they denounced slavery as incompatible with the

Douglass's feeling of pride at choosing his own employment was soured somewhat when white laborers on the wharves threatened to quit if the boss hired a black man.

My cause, first, midst, last, and always," he wrote, "was and is that of the black man; not because he is black, but because he is a man.

If you accept the position of governor, part of your job is to make sure all your people have a decent shot at making something good out of their lives.