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Quotes About Racism

I am a Negro and I know, being dark, I have been due in the past to see dark days, but them days is passing. All the fiery crosses in the world is not going to scare me back into where I were before the Harlem riots, Martin Luther King, Adam Powell, and Malcolm X. Also, I might include that lady, Annie Lee Cooper, who hit Sheriff Clark in the eye in Alabama. When a Southern colored woman hits a Southern white sheriff in the eye in a public place like Selma, a new day has come.
~ Langston Hughes
Song For a Dark Girl Way Down South in Dixie ?(Break the heart of me) They hung my black young lover ?To a cross roads tree. Way Down South in Dixie ?(Bruised body high in air) I asked the white Lord Jesus ?What was the use of prayer. Way Down South in Dixie ?(Break the heart of me) Love is a naked shadow ?On a gnarled and naked tree.
~ Langston Hughes
What animal would do this?"he said harshly. "No, little one, animals might scratch you, or bite you, or even rip you apart in hunger or fear, but only a man can crush you inside, in your heart, for no other reason than the colour of tour skin.
~ Lauren St John
If jurors were looking for a way to come back finding for the UKA, Mays had given it to them. Senator Michael Figures made the plaintiff's final arguments. He had been there on Herndon Street the morning of the lynching, and he had seen Donald's body hanging from a tree. He had been
~ Laurence Leamer
She told Figures that yes, the civil lawsuit against the Klan could be filed in her name. But she was still suspicious. She had learned long ago that the bigger a promise the less likely it would ever happen, and in her expertise that was doubly true when white men made the promise.
~ Laurence Leamer
The Klansmen and their frenzied followers ran through the silent, deserted streets, carrying clubs and chains. Favorite weapons were "head-knockers," hollowed-out baseball bats that had been filled with molten lead and then sealed back up so they looked like normal athletic equipment.
~ Laurence Leamer
While Dees was growing up, he had seen that black lives didn't matter, and until they did, there could be no true justice.
~ Laurence Leamer
Two white teenagers, one of them an Eagle Scout, had been looking forward to being part of the motorcade. Upset at the cancellation, they drove into black neighborhoods on a motorcycle carrying a Confederate flag. When they came upon two black boys on bicycles, one of the white youths fired his pistol at thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware and killed him.
~ Laurence Leamer
Driving home later that night, Dees lamented that young black people born after the end of the civil rights era knew almost nothing about those who had died so they could live freer lives. And those of the white race knew even less about one of the most important social and political movements in American history.
~ Laurence Leamer
Wallace seemed to be speaking of Shelton's clear objective when the candidate said, "The Klan wants to grow until it makes every office seeker in Alabama doubt that he can be elected without the Klan's seal of approval.
~ Laurence Leamer
In London in the 1980s some migrants from former British colonies in the Caribbean responded to racist attacks with a powerful slogan: "We are here because you were there.
~ Laurent Dubois
was the same dirty tint that would be used, for years to come, to justify the sidelong glances at anyone who might seem Chinese, to excuse the refusals of service and shouted slurs and spat-in faces, and later on, the baseball bats, the booted feet.
~ Celeste Ng
The average American, one judge ruled, cannot reasonably be expected to visually distinguish between various varieties of persons of Asian origin. As if they were types of apples, or breeds of dogs; as if those persons of Asian origin did not count as average Americans themselves. As if any of this might be justified by careful distinguishing on the part of the one wielding the bat.
~ Celeste Ng
White men, whether they are the majority or the minority, must find a way to purge themselves completely of racism, or face an ultimate fateful confrontation which will shake the very foundation of civilization.
~ Ralph J. Bunche, 1971
As Grace recounts in the pages that follow, Detroit's history is embedded with struggles that expose the contradictions inherent in the golden age. However, the city's deep despair further reminds us that, over the past four decades, the U.S. public has largely evaded responsibility for confronting the giant triplets of racism, militarism, and materialism.
~ Grace Lee Boggs
The slave-holders of the South," Adams wrote in his diary, "have bought the cooperation of the Western country by the bribe of the Western Lands."3 Now, he warned, a fight with Mexico over Texas would deepen the nation's habituation to racist wars, leading to the point where racism and war would be the only thing that gave the republic meaning.
~ Greg Grandin
We proved these people were wrongly removed. this was a Jim Crow operation. Except instead of white sheets they used spreadsheets.
~ Greg Palast
Uncle Tom' did not originate in fiction. Nor did he die with the Emancipation proclamation. He is perpetuated and immortalized in the type of leadership that sells the Negro for a few 'sound American dollars.
~ Gregg Andrews
1954, when the Eisenhower administration launched a program to deport all illegal immigrants. But America being America, la migra rounded up Mexican-Americans, legal immigrants—anyone who was brown, really. The program's name? Operation Wetback. The American experience is cyclical, of course, so expect Americans to soon begin calling Mexicans Sensenbeaners.
~ Gustavo Arellano
For Mrs. Bradley, the voice she heard was the voice of the resurrected Jesus. It spoke of hope that, although white racists could take her son's life, they could not deprive his life and death of an ultimate meaning. As in the resurrection of the Crucified One, God could transmute defeat into triumph, ugliness into beauty, despair into hope, the cross into the resurrection.
~ James H. Cone
If white Americans could look at the terror they inflicted on their own black population—slavery, segregation, and lynching—then they might be able to understand what is coming at them from others.
~ James H. Cone
If the Church is to remain faithful to its Lord, it must make a decisive break with the structure of this society by launching a vehement attack on the evils of racism in all forms. It must become prophetic, demanding a radical change in the interlocking structures of this society. This
~ James H. Cone
The essence of the gospel of Christ stands or falls on the question of black humanity, and there is no way that a church or institution can be related to the gospel of Christ if it sponsors or tolerates racism in any form.
~ James H. Cone
At the time, he and two of his classmates had been three of only eight black officers in the United States Army Air Forces. To get to that point they had had to be better than their white colleagues at every stage of the training programme.
~ James Holland