Stevie Ray Vaughan Quotes

You had your black bands, and you had your white bands, and if you mixed the two, you found less places to play.

I'd go over to friends' houses and ask them to put on some Howlin' Wolf, and they wouldn't know what I was talking about. Then, when they would come over to my house, I'd play them some blues. Their parents wouldn't let them come back. The blues were still called 'race records' back then.

I enjoy playing clubs. I still enjoy the closeness of the nightclub venue. However, after a certain period of time and after playing around some of the clubs in New YorkI felt that jazz should be presented in a more prestigious atmosphere.

I used to go to Bourbon Street when I was a kid and there would be club after club after club of people who were around when the music started. I mean these are legendary, maybe not so well known, but legendary musicians.

If social equality should be granted and intermarriage should become a matter of individual taste, then the pride of race and the sense of blood superiority which has heretofore protected the Southern whites would be destroyed.

There are still some black youth growing up in ghettoes in this country who will never know a white person—not even speak to one.

The Southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the Reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination

The collective memory of race relations in the United States overlooks and omits the reality of mixed race. There existed a squeamishness, a disgust, a denouncement of “race mixing” that sparked riots, instituted legal prohibitions, and constructed categories, each of which insist upon the genealogical separation of black, white, and red.

We have got to move away from the concept of race and color because that is what apartheid is. We cannot end apartheid if we retain these concepts.

In L.A., we listen to everything. If it's banging, it's banging - we don't care where it's from.

There was segregated unions, which was a real problem for me because - especially as I was working in the recording scene, I had flack from the white union for hiring black musicians. I had flack from the black musician by hiring white musicians.

Supporting segregation need not be racist. One can believe in segregation and believe in equality of the races.

The only way for peace between the races is a separation of the races.

In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what whites looked like.

Music itself was color-blind but the media and the radio stations segregate it based on their perceptions of the artists.

I think the notion that we are different just because of skin color, and that we should be kept apart or kept from interbreeding, is very hurtful.

What the apartheid system was really good at doing was convincing groups to hate one another.

In fact, one day I was going to Jackson and I saw a huge sign that U.S. Senator John Stennis was speaking that night for the White Citizens Council in Yazoo City and they also have a State Charter that they may set up for "private schools." It is no secret.

A Negro just can't be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up in the neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business, were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched.

Ralph Bunche, who is an internationally recognized and respected diplomat, can't stay in a hotel in Georgia, which means that no matter what the accomplishment, the intellectual, the academic, or professional level of a negro is, collectively he stands condemned.

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.

Let me speak frankly: separate but equal is a fraud. It is the language that tried to push Rosa Parks to the back of the bus. It is the motif that determined that black and white people could not possibly drink from the same water fountain, eat at the same table or use the same toilets.

I was born in segregated Birmingham, Alabama. I didn't have a white classmate till we moved to Denver.

I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side a town. I want to stop that moment from coming - and it come in ever white child's life - when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites. ... I pray that wasn't her moment, Pray I still got time.

Until we have a serious discussion, this problem [racism] will continue to occur.