Quotes About Injustice

In Los Angeles from 1937 to 1948, more than one hundred lawsuits sought to enforce restrictions by having African Americans evicted from their homes. In a 1947 case, an African American man was jailed for refusing to move out of a house he'd purchased in violation of a covenant.

The existence of black ghettos is a visible reminder of our inequalities and history, a reminder whose implications are so uncomfortable that we find ways to avoid them.

Richard Rothstein

In New Jersey, for example, Governor Harold Hoffman refused to allow any camps for African American corps members because of what he termed "local resentment." The national CCC director, Robert Fechner, implemented a policy never to "force colored companies on localities that have openly declared their opposition to them.

The USHA manual warned that it was undesirable to have projects for white families "in areas now occupied for Negroes" and added: "The aim of the [local housing] authority should be the preservation rather than the disruption of community social structures which best fit the desires of the groups concerned.

In the years since the 1926 Supreme Court ruling, numerous white suburbs in towns across the country have adopted exclusionary zoning ordinances to prevent low-income families from residing in their midst. Frequently, class snobbishness and racial prejudice were so intertwined that when suburbs adopted such ordinances, it was impossible to disentangle their motives and to prove that the zoning rules violated constitutional prohibitions of racial discrimination.

Because our majority culture has tended to think of African Americans as inferior, the words we've used to describe them, no matter how dignified they seem when first employed, eventually sound like terms of contempt. African Americans react and insist on new terminology, which we eventually accept, until it too seems to connote inferiority.

United States History: Reconstruction to the Present, a 2016 textbook issued by the educational publishing giant Pearson, offers a similar account. It celebrates the FHA's and VA's support of single-family developments and gives Levittown as an example of suburbanization without disclosing that African Americans were excluded. It boasts of the PWA's bridge, dam, power plant, and government building projects but omits describing its insistence on segregated housing.

It is caused, in its entirety, by a lifetime of bearing first-hand witness to, on behalf of everyone – courts, relatives, public, society – man's inhumanity to man. The result of this diagnosis? The summer of 2016 off work. Two cures: talking and pharmaceutical. And this book.

I gave them nothing back because all I knew was the vast amount they had taken from me, robbed me of, cheated me out of, all in the name of a God whose son bore the long hair none of us were allowed to wear any more.

Ils ont refusé de me laisser être juste un hockeyeur. Pour eux, je serais toujours un indien.

Contract freedom quickly revealed itself as a delusion when those negotiating contracts were so incommensurate in wealth and power.

Goddammit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like living in jail.

Violence is a personal necessity for the oppressed...It is not a strategy consciously devised. It is the deep, instinctive expression of a human being denied individuality.

They hate because they fear, and they fear because they feel that the deepest feelings of their lives are being assaulted and outraged. And they do not know why; they are powerless pawns in a blind play of social forces.

All literature is protest.

I knew that I lived in a country in which the aspirations of black people were limited, marked-off. Yet I felt that I had to go somewhere and do something to redeem my being alive.

But the color of a Negro's skin makes him easily recognizable, makes him suspect, converts him into a defenseless target

Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like livin' in jail.

Ask yourself if it is not also your sin that such tragedies occur, that such Christian families are alone and not helped by you who are free.

Aveva vinto, ma non si sentiva vincitore. Era riuscito a raddrizzare il corso della propria esistenza, ma si sentiva più che mai vittima dell'indifferenza del mondo. Non sembrava giusto.

That," I told Tatiana, "is the most fucked-up law I have ever heard.

That," I told Tatiana, "is the most fucked up law I have ever heard." [...] "You could change the quorum law if you wanted, you sanctimonious bitch!" I yelled back.

I felt my heart breaking all over again. Why? Why had this happened to us? Why was the universe so cruel?