Patrick Sharkey Quotes

While housing discrimination and segregation in 2005 still affect millions of people, that's not the way it has to be. Some things can change and should.

Private businesses ought to get to discriminate.

I want a fair housing bill. We’ve got to end this Goddamn discrimination against Negroes. Until people, whether they’re purple, brown, black, yellow, red, green, or whatever – live together, they’ll never know they have the same hopes for their children, the same fears, troubles, woes, ambitions.

In the 1960’s I was opposed to a system of preferences known as white supremacy. I am still against preferences.

The people of this country will not stand for this decision. It will never work. It will destroy the country. God does not intend that the races should mix. It is against everything that makes America great.

I am an enemy of racism

If a neighborhood is to retain stability, it is necessary that properties should continue to be occupied by the same social and racial classes.

FHA has never held interracial characteristics in a project or neighborhood to be a basis of eligibility or ineligibility for mortgage insurance, per se.

Providing employment for the swelling Negro ghetto population will require ...opening suburban residential areas to Negroes and encouraging them to move closer to industrial centers.

I have consistently opposed forced bussing to achieve integration.

When population shifts - brought about by fair housing laws, affirmative action and landmark school desegregation rulings - political power is challenged as well.

I am the perfect affirmative action baby.

The big challenge we’ve been confronting over the last two years is, how do we get women and people of color to join the F.B.I. ? That’s been our big trouble, and I’ve described it as a crisis.

Instead of eliminating class distinctions, suburbs were turned into class-conscious fortresses. Zoning ordinances set lot sizes and restricted the construction of apartment buildings, emphasizing single-dwelling homes to keep out undesirable lower-class families.

Suburban subdivisions encouraged buyers to live with their “own kind,” constantly sorting people by religion, ethnicity, race, and class.

The new integration plans being offered are really just quota systems to assure a certain number of blacks, Chicanos or whatever in each school… What it says is, ‘In order for your child with curly black hair, brown eyes, and dark skin to be able to learn anything, he needs to sit next to my blond-haired, blue-eyed son.’ That’s racist! Who the hell do we think we are, that the only way a black man or woman can learn is if they rub shoulders with my white child?

What most Americans don't realize is a lot of the challenges we're struggling with today are the result of conscious housing policies.

Black history is part of American history, and it should be treated as such.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

Yes, President Abraham Lincoln was a Republican, but a hundred years later, the Republican Party wasn't Lincoln's. Richard Nixon became president by courting Americans upset by integration, intentionally fueling the racial divide.

People don't talk about small-town racism in Illinois or upstate New York. They're like, 'It's the South.' And it is. It's there. But it's everywhere. But everywhere, there are also amazing people.

We've come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

One of the most interesting social trends of the past 20 years is the rise of residential segregation. So rich are living with rich and poor are living with poor.

I've never said that you should have segregation of the school system or any other.

The social and physical construction of suburban America really was quite complex. It was a very elaborate system, and clearly a massive social engineering project that has changed U.S. society enormously.