Quotes About Equality

They say the kids are dumb and so they're teaching them to work with their hands. Those kids aren't dumb. But the people who run these schools want to make sure that they don't get smart: they are really teaching the kids to be slaves.

It is only 'the so-called American Negro' who remains trapped, disinherited, and despised, in a nation that has kept him in bondage for nearly four hundred years and is still unable to recognise him as a human being.

The fear that I heard in my father's voice, for example, when he realized that I really believed I could do anything a white boy could do, and had every intention of proving it, was not at all like the fear I heard when one of us was ill or had fallen down the stairs or strayed too far from the house. It was another fear, a fear that the child, in challenging the white world's assumptions, was putting himself in the path of destruction.

White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed. People more advantageously placed than we in Harlem were, and are, will no doubt find the psychology and the view of human nature sketched above dismal and shocking in the extreme.

Whoever debases others is debasing himself. That is not a mystical statement but a most realistic one...

You were born where you were born and faced the future that you faced because you were black and for no other reason.

Everything now, we must assume, is in our hands; we have no right to assume otherwise. If we—and now I mean the relatively conscious whites and the relatively conscious blacks, who must, like lovers, insist on, or create, the consciousness of the others—do not falter in our duty now, we may be able, handful that we are, to end the racial nightmare, and achieve our country, and change the history of the world.

Well, the black man has functioned in the white man's world as a fixed star, as an immovable pillar: and as he moves out of his place, heaven and earth are shaken to their foundations. You, don't be afraid.

And, in fact, the truth about the black man, as a historical entity and as a human being, has been hidden from him, deliberately and cruelly; the power of the white world is threatened whenever a black man refuses to accept the white world's definitions

men may be at the mercy of women - I think men like that idea, it strokes the misogynist in them.

who watches German prisoners of war being treated by Americans with more human dignity than he has ever received at their hands.

But if women are supposed to be led by men and there aren't any men to lead them, what happens then? What happens then?

The tragedy of this country now is that most of the people who say they care about it do not care. What they care about is their safety and their profits. What they care about is not rocking the boat. What they care about is the continuation of white supremacy, so that white liberals who are with you in principle will move out when you move in.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be "accepted" by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don't wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on this planet

who was saying that no people in history had ever been respected who had not owned their land. And the table said, "Yes, that's right." I could not deny the truth of this statement.

Men have to think about so many things. Women only have to think about men.

Urban Renewal' [...] means Negro removal.

The white man needs the nigger because he cannot tolerate the nigger in himself.

It I'd galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them. (From The Fure Next Time)

I would not allow myself to be defined by other people, white or black." —James Baldwin

I cannot depend upon the American moral credit to save some of the people that I love.

It I'd galling indeed to have stood so long, hat in hand, waiting for Americans to grow up enough to realize that you do not threaten them. (from The Fire Next Time)

What is it you wanted me to reconcile myself to? I was born here almost 60 years ago, I'm not gonna live another 60 years. You always told me it takes time. It's taken my father's time, my mother's time. My uncle's time. My brother's and my sister's time. My nieces' and my nephews' time. How much time do you want? For your progress.

But white people seem affronted by the black distrust of white policemen, and appear to be astonished that a black man, woman, or child can have any reason to fear a white cop.