Quotes About Equality

Two white men in two days had their hands around her. Was this a condition of her freedom? Caesar

Cora had heard Michael recite the Declaration of Independence back on the Randall plantation many times, his voice drifting through the village like an angry phantom. She didn't understand the words, most of them at any rate, but 'created equal' was not lost on her. The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if 'all men' did not truly mean all men.

The whites got what they deserved. For enslaving her people, for massacring another race, for stealing the very land itself. Let them burn by flame or fever, let the destruction started here rove acre by acre until the dead have been avenged.

In another country they would have been criminals, but this was America.

In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal. On

When the slaves finished, they had stripped the fields of their color. It was a magnificent operation, from seed to bale, but no one of them could be prideful of their labor. It had been stolen from them. Bled from them.

Slavery is a sin when whites were put to the yoke, but not the African. All men are created equal, unless we decide you are not a man. Under

Robbing the Hotel Theresa was like taking a piss on the Statue of Liberty. It was like slipping Jackie Robinson a Mickey the night before the World Series.

All men are created equal, unless we decide that you are not a man.

sometimes laughter knocked out a few bricks from the barricade of segregation, so tall and so wide.

You can change the law, but you can't change people and how they treat each other.

Elwood dressed in the dark slacks from last year's Emancipation Day play. He'd grown a few inches, so he let them out and they showed the barest sliver of his white socks. A new emerald tie clip held his black tie in place and the knot only took six attempts. His shoes glinted with polish. He looked the part, even if he still worried for his glasses if the police brought out nightsticks. If the whites carried iron pipes and baseball bats.

Si ellos podían, ¿por qué no ella? Toda su vida se le había negado todo.

Black hands built the White House, the seat of our nation's government. The word we. We are not one people but many different people. How can one person speak for this great, beautiful race—which is not one race but many, with a million desires and hopes and wishes for ourselves and our children?

Freedom was a community laboring for something lovely and rare. Mingo

Reverend King's equation. Throw us in jail and we will still love you…But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory. No, he could not make that leap to love.

All I truly know is that we rise and fall as one, one colored family living next door to one white family. We may not know the way through the forest, but we can pick each other up when we fall, and we will arrive together." —

The white men were silent. As if they'd given up or decided that a small freedom was the worst punishment of all, presenting the bounty of true freedom into painful relief. One

the immense exertion white people put into grinding them down

She threw him a bone about the movement: 'Lyndon Johnson's carrying on President Kennedy's civil rights bill. And if that good old boy is doing right, you know things is changing. Be a whole different thing when you come home, Elwood.

if a bird could be taught limericks, a slave might be taught to remember as well. Merely glancing at the size of the skulls told you that a nigger possessed a bigger brain than a bird.

South Carolina has a much more enlightened attitude toward colored advancement than the rest of the south.

The white men who wrote it didn't understand it either, if all men did not truly mean all men.

Racial prejudice rotted one's faculties, he said.