Quotes About Injustice

American whites somehow were able collectively to love liberty, recognize the evils of slavery, and tolerate slavery, all at the same

Everybody went to jail in the Cause eventually. You could be the tiniest ant able to slip into a crack in the sidewalk, or a rocket ship that flew fast enough to break the speed of sound, it didn't matter. When society dropped its hammer on your head, well, there it is.

I asked her who he was and she said, "He was a man ahead of his time." She actually liked Malcolm X. She put him in nearly the same category as her other civil rights heroes, Paul Robeson, Jackie Robinson, Eleanor Roosevelt, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Kennedys—any Kennedy. When Malcolm X talked about "the white devil" Mommy simply felt those references didn't apply to her.

He ain't gonna live long, child. He's crazy. He thinks the n***ers's equal to the white man.

Nothing in this world is dangerous unless white folks says it is," she said flatly. "Danger here. Danger there. We don't need you to tell us about danger in these projects. We don't need you to say what the world is to us.

and on it went, the whole business of the white man's reality lumping together like a giant, lopsided snowball, the Great American Myth, the Big Apple, the Big Kahuna, the City That Never Sleeps, while the blacks and Latinos who cleaned the apartments and dragged out the trash and made the music and filled the jails with sorrow slept the sleep of the invisible and functioned as local color.

Fact is, I never knowed a Negro from that day to this but who couldn't lie to themselves about their own evil while pointing out the white man's wrong, and I weren't no exception.

Nobody asked the Negro what he thunk about the whole business, by the way, nor the Indian, when I think of it, for neither of their thoughts didn't count, even through most of the squabbling was about them on the outside, for at bottom the whole business was about land and money, something nobody who was squabbling seemed to ever get enough of.

I come to enjoy them talks, for even though I'd gotten used to living a lie—being a girl—it come to me this way: Being a Negro's a lie, anyway. Nobody sees the real you. Nobody knows who you are inside. You just judged on what you are on the outside whatever your color. Mulatto, colored, black, it don't matter. You just a Negro to the world.

There ain't nothing gets a Yankee madder than a smart colored person, of which I reckon they figured there was only one in the world, Mr. Douglass.

I read the book on not being explained to. That's called being an old colored woman, sir.

Being a Negro means showing your best face to the white man every day. You know his wants, his needs, and watch him proper. But he don't know your wants. He don't know your needs or feelings or what's inside you, for you ain't equal to him in no measure. You just a nigger to him. A thing: like a dog or a shovel or a horse.

Slavery done made a fool out of a lot of folks. Twisted 'em all different kinds of ways. I seen it happen many a time in my day. I expect it'll happen in all our tomorrows, too, for when you slave a person, you slave the one in front and the one behind.

People want us, or want us dead, because of what we are, not who we are. It's hard.

My parents were just carried out of the building in the service elevator, he shouted at the cops. They were vile, but they didn't deserve to be taken out with the trash!

People want us, or want us dead, because of what we are, not who we are. It's hard. ~Angel

The unmistakable hurt of a child ignored, a child discovering that justice didn't always play out in the real world.

American violence mirrors that of my home country. And the laws here, much like where I was born, seem to favor criminals and not victims. Criminals get released very quickly.

The Vietnam vets? They got screwed, too. So did the ones who fought in Desert Storm. And now it's happening all over again for the soldiers who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. When is this going to stop? When are they going to fulfill their promises?

Until they quit kicking vets in the balls, it's time for everyone to feel what vets have suffered, what they still suffer.

raping and beating her

The Black Velvet Band

Stevie Kosgrov punched me just like I was a regular, normal kid

When I was growing up, my mother used to say, 'Don't ever bring no nappy-head Black girl to my house.' In the deep South in the '50s, '60s and '70s, the shade of your Blackness was considered important. So I, unfortunately, grew up hearing that message.