Quotes About Injustice

Members of Congress, outraged by the events at Selma, forty times interrupted his address with applause. Johnson closed by raising his thumbs, fists clenched, and proclaiming, Their cause must be our cause, too. Because it is not just Negroes, but really all of us who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And, we shall . . . overcome.

As Ellison's black protagonist exclaimed in Invisible Man, You ache with the need to convince yourself that you do exist in the real world, that you're part of all the sound and anguish, and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to make them [whites] recognize you.30 This did not happen much in the 1940s, but it did in the 1960s, when advocates of black power pushed whites out of the civil rights movement.

Now, taking books, or anything else, from a little girl is like taking arms from an Arab, or candy from a baby...

Socially, segregation labeled African Americans as less than human; the term "boy" itself, applied to the Scottsboro defendants even as they became elderly, implied that they were less than men.

Very few adults today realize that our society has been slave much longer than it has been free.

No book can convey the depths of the black experience without including material from the oppressed group. Yet not one textbook in my original sample let African Americans speak for themselves.

After Col. Henry Bouquet defeated the Ohio Indians at Bushy Run in 1763, he demanded the release of all white captives. Most of them, especially the children, had to be "bound hand and foot" and forcibly returned to white society. Meanwhile, the Native prisoners "went back to their defeated relations with great signs of joy," in the words of the anthropologist Frederick Turner (in Beyond Geography, 245). Turner rightly calls these scenes "infamous and embarrassing.

The first requirement of a slave society is secure borders. We do not like to think of the United States as a police state, a nation like East Germany that people had to escape from, but the slaveholding states were just that. Indeed, after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which made it easy for whites to kidnap and sell free blacks into slavery, thousands of free African Americans realized they could not be safe even in Northern states and fled to Canada, Mexico, and Haiti.

To summarize, waves of ethnic cleansing swept across the United States between about 1890 and 1940, leaving thousands of sundown towns in their wake. Thousands of sundown suburbs formed even later, some as late as the 1960s. As recently as the 1970s, elite suburbs like Edina, Minnesota, would openly turn away Jewish and black would-be home buyers. Some towns and suburbs were still sundown when this book went to press in 2005.

Our culture teaches us to locate overt racism long ago (in the nineteenth century) or far away (in the South) or to marginalize it as the work of a few crazed deviants who carried out their violent works under cover of darkness.

Sundown town police forces, in addition to being all-white, may still be viewed by themselves and other residents as a city's first line of defense against black interlopers. As a result, they engage in DWB ("Driving While Black") policing, targeting black motorists for minor infractions like failing to signal turns.

White mobs killed African Americans across the United States. Some of these events, like the 1919 Chicago riot, are well-known. Others, such as the 1921 riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which whites dropped dynamite from airplanes onto a black ghetto, killing more than seventy-five people and destroying more than eleven hundred homes, have completely vanished from our history books.

Christopher Columbus introduced two phenomena that revolutionized race relations and transformed the modern world: the taking of land, wealth, and labor from indigenous people in the Western Hemisphere, leading to their near extermination, and the transatlantic slave trade, which created a racial underclass.

This is part of a pattern in our textbooks: anything bad in America history happened anonymously.

To end our segregated neighborhoods and towns requires a leap of the imagination: Americans have to understand that white racism is still a problem in the United States. This isn't always easy. Most white Americans do not see racism as a problem in their neighborhood. We need to know about sundown towns to know what to do about them.

The authors make no connection between the failure of the United States to guarantee black civil rights in 1877 and the need for a civil rights movement a century later. Nothing ever causes anything. Things just happen.

African Americans helped build Hoover Dam but had to commute from Las Vegas to do it, while white workers and their families lived in Boulder City, a sundown town built just for them. African Americans helped build Kentucky Dam, but after they finished, their housing—"Negro Village"—was razed, they were booted out, and Marshall County, Kentucky, resumed being a sundown county.

Recovering the memory of the increasing oppression of African Americans during the first half of the twentieth century can deepen our understanding of the role racism has played in our society and continues to play today.

In June 1906, the city council of Santa Ana, California, passed a resolution that called for the fire department to burn each and every one of the said buildings known as Chinatown; on June 26 a crowd of more than a thousand watched it burn.

Bartolomé de Las Casas

We do not like to think of the United States as a police state, a nation like East Germany that people had to escape from, but the slaveholding states were just that.

No sensible Indian person," wrote George P. Horse Capture, "can celebrate the arrival of Columbus."90 Cherishing Columbus is a characteristic of white history, not American history.

As Ellis Cose famously raged: I have done everything I was supposed to do. I have stayed out of trouble with the law, gone to the right schools, and worked myself nearly to death. What more do they want? Why in God's name won't they accept me as a full human being?

For our first seventy years as a nation, then, slavery made our foreign policy more sympathetic with imperialism than with self-determination