Richard Wright Quotes
Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like livin' in jail.
Wright, Richard. Native Son. Harper & Brothers, 1940.
The highway was planned to go through a poor neighborhood which had a high percentage of Black residents—all of whom would have to find other housing and move to make room for the highway. If the government plans a highway through a wealthy area, the cost to condemn and pay for the land will be much greater than if a poor neighborhood is acquired. For urban highways, the poor almost always bear a disproportionate share of the inconvenience while the major benefit inures to the wealthy and middle class. Abbot had been a labor organizer and a professional artist before he entered politics. The graphic is of his famous poster which by itself stopped the plans to build the highway very quickly.
This became one of the most widely quoted statements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Booth was the younger son of a very prominent Northern family of actors. His older brother was considered the greatest American actor, and the rest of the family were abolitionists and vehement Union supporters. They found young John’s views reprehensible.
Senator Glen Taylor was arrested on May 1, 1948, in Birmingham, Alabama by police commissioner Eugene "Bull" Connor, for attempting to use a door reserved for African Americans, rather than the whites-only door, while attempting to attend a meeting of the Southern Negro Youth Congress. He was subsequently convicted of disorderly conduct. It is hard to believe that such a thing happened in America but it did. ER was one of the few Democrats to condemn such behavior. She took a great deal of criticism from the Southern Democrats for this column. They claimed she called White Southerners “Stupid.”
Richard Nathaniel Wright was an American author of novels, short stories, poems, and non-fiction. Much of his literature concerns racial themes, especially related to the plight of African Americans during the late 19th to mid-20th centuries, who suffered discrimination and violence in the South and the North. Literary critics believe his work helped change race relations in the United States in the mid-20th century.
