Coretta Scott King Quotes

I abhor the brutality that smears the good name of one of the fairest sections of our land. Shame on you, George Wallace.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

I know my destiny. I was born into animosity, bigotry and hatred. We had water for white folks, and water for coloured folks. White lines, black lines. I came from Beaufort in South Carolina, and it was tougher than Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

On the horizon loom a growing number of iconoclasts and Atheists, young black men and women who can read think and ask questions; and who impertinently demand to know why Negroes should revere a god that permits them to be lynched, Jim-Crowed, and disenfranchised.

It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country…. The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to Hell!

I feel George Wallace symbolizes something in the past which America has rejected.

My grandmother, when she was young, would've walked past shops where some folks had out a sign that said, 'No Mexicans or dogs allowed.'

Often in red states you find racism, and where you find racism, you also find sexism.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is and what he has done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States and the world. He walks us on a tightrope from birth.

Trump is the worst. I mean, he is like a shape shifter. You can't nail him down. It is like the last gasp, the last bastion of old white males, of white supremacy and hegemony.

When a black church is hit in South Carolina by someone with hate in their spirit, that's something that touches all of America, but as a person of color, I see that story even through a deeper prism of, 'Gosh, that takes us back to a time when black churches were targets in this country.'

The history of African-American repression in this country rose from government-sanctioned racism. Jim Crow laws were a product of bigoted state and local governments.

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

I waited at the counter of a white restaurant for eleven years. When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

While he was in the service, in the South and in Oklahoma, he was refused service at a couple of places where he was in uniform, and was told that African Americans, blacks, Negros, were not served. And in spite of that, I've never known a man who loved this country more than my father did.

When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like it.

The world is still very bigoted.

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.

A free society will abide unofficial, private discrimination, even when that means allowing hate-filled groups to exclude people based on the color of their skin.

Intolerance has been the curse of our country.

Well, I've been politically involved for a really long time. Growing up in the segregated South, it was a very painful experience for me to live through the open racism of the time.

I believe discrimination still exists in society and we must fight it in every form.