Quotes About Injustice

he felt that they ruled him, even when they were far away and not thinking of him, ruled him by conditioning him in his relations to his own people. The

I knew that he was using the Negro vote to control the city hall; in turn, he was engaged in vast political deals of which the Negro voters, political innocents, had no notion. With my pencil I wrote in a determined scrawl across the face of the ballots: I Protest This Fraud

This Court should not sit to fix punishment for this boy; it should sit to ponder why there are not more like him! And there are, Your Honor. If it were not for the backwaters of religion, gambling and sex draining off their energies into channels harmful to them and profitable to us, more of them would be here today. Be assured!

And when I contemplated the area of No Man's Land into which the Negro mind in America had been shunted I wondered if there had ever existed in all human history a more corroding and devastating attack upon the personalities of men than the idea of racial discrimination.

Bob had been caught by the white death, the threat of which hung over every male black in the South. I had heard whispered tales of black boys having sex relations with white prostitutes in the hotels in town, but I had never paid any close attention to them; now those tales came home to me in the form of the death of a man I knew. I did not search for a job that day; I returned home

His jobs in the South were marked by harassment by whites and by his own disdain for what segregation and racism had done to distort the humanity of his fellow blacks, as he saw it.

If this state of affairs had lasted for two or three years, we could say that it was unjust; but it lasted for more than two hundred years. Injustice which lasts for three long centuries and which exists among millions of people over thousands of square miles of territory, is injustice no longer; it is an accomplished fact of life.

was building up in me a dream which the entire educational system of the South had been rigged to stifle. I was feeling the very thing that the state of Mississippi had spent millions

They don't even let you feel what you want to feel. They after you so hot and hard you can only feel what they doing to you. They kill you before you die.

What quality of will must a Negro possess to live and die with dignity in a country that denied his humanity? There took shape in my mind—

They were paying me to distract Bigger with ping-pong, checkers, swimming, marbles, and baseball in order that he might not roam the streets and harm the valuable white property which adjoined the Black Belt. I am not condemning boys' clubs and ping-pong as such; but these little stopgaps were utterly inadequate to fill up the centuries-long chasm of emptiness which American civilization had created in these Biggers.

My life as a Negro in America had led me to feel—though my helplessness had made me try to hide it from myself—that the problem of human unity was more important than bread, more important than physical living itself; for I felt that without a common bond uniting men, without a continuous current of shared thought and feeling circulating through the social system, like blood coursing through the body, there could be no living worthy of being called human.

Out of the magazines I read came a passionate call for the experiences of the disinherited, and there were none of the lame lispings of the missionary in it. It did not say: Be like us and we will like you, maybe. It said: If you possess enough courage to speak out what you are, you will find that you are not alone.

I had long ago emotionally rejected the world in which I lived and my reaction was: Well, this is the system by which people want the world to run whether it helps them or not.

Why should he care about the world? The world didn't give a damn about him.

Oh, come on!' Percy complained. 'I get a little nosebleed and I wake up the entire earth? That's not fair!

That was so completely unfair that I told Tantalus to go chase a donut, which didn't help his mood.

Everyone remembered Lord Lucan's name, but hardly anyone remembered Sandra Rivett, the nanny he clubbed to death. The wrong person in the wrong place at the wrong time. Like Gabrielle Mason and her children, also mostly forgotten by the collective memory. Who could name one of the Yorkshire Ripper's victims? Or the Wests'? The forgotten dead. Victims faded, murderers lived on in the memory, only the police kept the eternal flame alight, passing it on as the years went by.

Freda knew that she could tell Cissy about Mr. Birdwhistle's lewd approaches, but she was used to being blamed for the bad behaviour of others and suspected it would be no different in the case of the octopus's wandering tentacles.

Look at the Germans, the most cultured and well mannered of people, and yet… Auschwitz, Treblinka, Bergen-Belsen. Given the same set of circumstances it could just as well have been the English

All that is necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good women to do nothing. The

Male privilege is, in a word, violence.

Furlough?" He said. "What?" said the first hood irritably. Despereaux shuddered. His own brother was delivering him to the dungeon. His heart stopped beating and shrunk to a small, cold, disbelieving pebble.

Boots and guns had replaced banners and horses, but the story was the same. Men with black hearts. With black souls.