Quotes About Race

Blood that has soaked into the sands of a beach is all of one color. America stands unique in the world: the only country not founded on race but on a way, an ideal. Not in spite of but because of our polyglot background, we have had all the strength in the world. That is the American way.

He 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

It's tempting to romanticize the words King spoke before the Lincoln Memorial. To do so, however, cheapens the courage of the nonviolent soldiers of freedom who faced—and too often paid—the ultimate price for daring America to live up to the implications of the Declaration of Independence and become a country in which liberty was innate and universal, not particular to station, creed, or color.

The saga of race in America is a tragic one—and it unfolds still. In Lincoln's hour upon the stage, many hoped he would go farther along the road toward equality than he did; many feared any step at all. But on he walked.

Black people, Taney went on, "had for more than a century before been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior, that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

If the President's theory is carried to its ultimate conclusion," Senator Pat Harrison, Democrat of Mississippi, remarked, "then that means that the black man can strive to become President of the United States.

The message of Martin Luther King, Jr.—that we should be judged on the content of our character, not on the color of our skin

The absolute equality of races—physical, political and social—is the founding stone of world peace and human advancement. No one denies great differences of gift, capacity and attainment among individuals of all races, but the voice of science, religion and practical politics is one in denying the God-appointed existence of superior races, or of races naturally and inevitably and eternally inferior." For Du Bois, "To deny this fact is to throw

Your race are suffering, in my judgment, the greatest wrong inflicted on any people," Lincoln told a delegation of blacks in August 1862. "But even when you cease to be slaves, you are yet far removed from being placed on an equality with the white race….I

Such hysteria was fomented, Wright noted, by appeals to poor whites for whom color was everything since they had nothing else.

appealing to race and religious hatreds is so thoroughly un-American and so contemptible that we are surprised that any intelligent person would engage in such perfidy for even one performance," The Dalton Citizen, a newspaper in North Georgia, wrote in 1925.

And so while whites built and dreamed, people of color were subjugated and exploited by a rising nation that prided itself on the expansion of liberty. Those twin tragedies shaped us then and ever after.

think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon. —Words popularly attributed to SOJOURNER TRUTH, the Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, 1851

Writing in 1903, the scholar, historian, and activist W.E.B. Du Bois observed that "the problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line," and, while Du Bois was surely right, it is correct, too, to say that color in some ways remains the problem of American history as a whole.

The Memphis Commercial Appeal said, "President Roosevelt has committed a blunder that is worse than a crime, and no atonement or future act of his can remove the self-imprinted stigma." Alabama's Geneva Reaper was especially harsh. "Poor Roosevelt!" the paper wrote. "He might now just as well sleep with Booker Washington, for the scent of that coon will follow him to the grave as far as the South is concerned.

Words attributed long afterward to Sojourner Truth, who spoke to a Woman's Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851, put the struggles of the day well: "I think that 'twixt the negroes of the South and the women at the North, all talking about rights, the white men will be in a fix pretty soon.

Race is there. You're tire of hearing about it? Imagine how fucking exhausting it is living it.

I am just mystified by these people telling me I would think Obama was doing a great job if his skin contained less melanin.

Încep s? cred c? paradisul nu e o mulÈ›umire veÈ™nic?. Ci ma degrab? o stare de mulÈ›umire care face totul s? par? veÈ™nic. Nu exist? via?? veÈ™nic? pentru c? n-o s? câÈ™tigi niciodat? cursa cu timpul, totuÈ™i, dac? eÈ™ti mulÈ›umit, poÈ›i sc?pa de timp, pentru c? ajunge s? nu mai conteze.

Many suburban legislators representing affluent school districts use terms such as sinkhole when opposing funding for Chicago's children. We can't keep throwing money, said Governor Thompson in 1988, into a black hole. The Chicago Tribune notes that, when this phrase is used, people hasten to explain that it is not intended as a slur against the race of many of Chicago's children. But race, says the Tribune, never is far from the surface...

All white people, I think, are implicated in these things so long as we participate in America in a normal way and attempt to go on leading normal lives while any one race is being cheated and tormented. But I now believe that we will probably go on leading our normal lives, and will go on participating in our nation in a normal way, unless there comes a time where Negroes can compel us by methods of extraordinary pressure to interrupt our pleasure.

The struggle being waged today, where there is any struggle being waged at all, is closer to the one that was addressed in 1896 in Plessy v. Ferguson, in which the court accepted segregated institutions for black people, stipulating only that they must be equal to those open to white people. The dual society, at least in public education, seems in general to be unquestioned.

It has recently become a matter of some interest to the press and to some academic experts to determine whether it is race or class that is the major factor in denial of these children. The question always strikes me as a scholar's luxury. To kindergarten children in the schools of Paterson or Camden, it can hardly matter very much to know if the denial they experience is caused by their skin color or their destitution.

Based on Gulliver's descriptions of their behaviour, the King describes Europeans as the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.