Quotes About Injustice

Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the words I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities, were theirs, not mine. But they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head,—some way.

Be content to be servants, and nothing more; what need of higher culture for half-men?

simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.

with growing exploitation, until they fought slavery to save democracy and then lost democracy in a new and vaster slavery.

An Attack on the fundamental democratic foundation-Modern European white industry does not even theoretically seek the good of all but simply of all Europeans.

We who know may not forget but must forever spread the splendid sordid truth that out of the most lowly and persecuted of men, Man made America. And that what Man has here begun with all its want and imperfection, with all its magnificent promise and grotesque failure will some day blossom in the souls of the Lowly.

But before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this he stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse

the black folks say that only colored boys are sent to jail, and they not because they are guilty, but because the State needs criminals to eke out its income by their forced labor. Immigrants

THE problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line

rich and bitter depth of their experience, the

The Negro farmer started behind,—started in debt. This was not his choosing, but the crime of this happy-go-lucky nation which goes blundering along with its Reconstruction tragedies, its Spanish war interludes and Philippine matinees, just as though God really were dead. Once in debt, it is no easy matter for a whole race to emerge.

By straining his political power to the utmost, the Negro got a public school system and got it because that was one clear object which he understood and which no bribery or chicanery could seduce him from advocating and insisting upon season in and out.

the burden belongs to the nation, and the hands of none of us are clean if we bend not our energies to righting these great wrongs.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships. He felt the weight of his ignorance, — not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of the humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled his hands and feet. Nor

obliteration of the Negro home. A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the world, but rather allowed to give all its time and thought to its own social problems.

A nation's religion is its life, and as such white Christianity is a miserable failure.

I refused to teach Sunday school. When Archdeacon Henry Phillips, my last rector, died, I flatly refused again to join any church or sign any church creed. From my 30th year on I have increasingly regarded the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, color caste, exploitation of labor and war.

The World War was primarily the jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker races.

Away with the black man's ballot, by force or fraud

position,—for the Negro to realize more deeply than he does at present the need of uplifting the masses of his people, for the white people to realize more vividly than they have yet done the deadening and disastrous effect of a color-prejudice that classes Phillis Wheatley

Racism is not just hatred. Racism is a system. A system that dehumanizes humans in order to keep them down and, most often, to make money off of them. -- Adam Gidwitz, The Inheritance

You are a steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. Or, if you prefer we could call you a scrupulous coroner.

When you deserved it, even the mail could rape you.

You are a meticulous steward of the pain and injustices people have visited upon you. Or, if you prefer, we could call you a scrupulous coroner.