Quotes About Prejudice

Most racists are less vicious than Nazis, and at the same time, they're considerably harder to deal with. It is precisely the way that gardenvariety racists don't think of themselves as such that makes it tougher to address them, especially because, despite their lack of self-awareness when it comes to their biases, their willingness to deploy the same is legion.

The black novelist Chester Himes wrote a letter to the editor of the New York Post the day he heard the news of Milam's and Bryant's acquittals: "The real horror comes when your dead brain must face the fact that we as a nation don't want it to stop. If we wanted to, we would.

We are still killing black youth because we have not yet killed white supremacy.

Isn't it strange that with all our educational advantages," noted the Hoosier writer Meredith Nicholson, so many "Indiana citizens could be induced to pay $10 for the privilege of hating their neighbors and wearing a sheet?

The governor of Georgia, Clifford Walker, told a Klan rally in 1924 that the United States should "build a wall of steel, a wall as high as heaven" against immigrants.

the Klan had "changed its bed sheets for a policeman's uniform.

Murray hated Jews as well. Blacks had some virtues, but Jews had none, in his view.

The second-wave Klan could return to its roots of terror because it had survived the kind of scrutiny that would have killed off any other secret society in a democracy

A Klan mayor ruled Anaheim, California; the city was nicknamed "Klanaheim.

The biggest achievement of the Oregon Klan—the vote by a majority of the people to essentially outlaw Catholic schools in the state—also fell.

The house was thick with politicians and thick with Klansmen, one and the same.

To avoid trouble, one large manufacturing company made membership in the Ku Klux Klan a qualification for employment

In Marion County, every major elected official but two was a Klansman.

Fully half the town of 30,000 belonged to the Klan, including mayor, prosecutor, police force, and school board.

It came about that American citizens in Indiana were judged by their religion, condemned because of their race, illegally punished because of their opinions, hounded because of their personal conduct, and a state of terror was substituted for a state of law.

Kokomo has seen with its own eyes the class of people who comprise the Klan," the Fiery Cross wrote in its report of the biggest day in the history of the Ku Klux Klan. "It saw staunch American farmers with their wives; merchants of repute; bankers of integrity; honest and hard-working mechanics, and ministers and devout church members.

aimed at all of Western Europe except Jews, who

What many Americans heard about Jews they got from Henry Ford, operating out of a Michigan base less than three hundred miles from Indianapolis. His newspaper, the Dearborn Independent, was a fire hose of anti-Semitism and reached a peak circulation of nearly one million readers.

By the mid-1920s, there were more Klansmen, per capita, in Oregon than any state but Indiana.

the American Breeders Association, had nothing to do with horses; its eugenics committee was headed by a man who'd been president of Indiana University, and the first president of Stanford, David S. Jordan. He taught that the human race could be improved only by preventing the disabled or certain nonwhites from reproducing

Still, he was the leader of a violent hate group. The profile in the paper had painted the Grand Dragon as the relatively benign boss of Indiana, with Stephenson asserting that his "Klan is not based on racial, religious or other prejudice.

The state had passed the world's first eugenic sterilization law, targeting "idiots, imbeciles, and confirmed criminals," as the statute dictated. The Klan was now pushing for a more severe measure, singling out paupers, alcoholics, thieves, prostitutes, and those with epilepsy to be sterilized against their will.

The Negro is among us and the race should be encouraged to progress, but that path should never lead to social mingling," warned the Indianapolis Star in 1921.

I want to put all the Catholics, Jews and Negroes on a raft in the middle of the ocean and then sink the raft," said a Klan speaker in rural Whitley County, just outside Fort Wayne. His suggestion was met with wild applause.