Jessye Norman Quotes

Our schools are more segregated today than they have ever been since 1968. The schools that I visit hardly have any white students…. Schools that had desegregated, are now resegregating.

All the people of the South are in favor of segregation. And Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, we are going to maintain segregated schools.

Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

Segregation of schools is no accident.

White southerners used anti communism to beat back the challenges to the status quo on race.

Students who spend their lives in segregated schools can look forward to a life on the margins.

As the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case has shown us, separate is not always equal.

I was the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960.

We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.

In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.

Our nation's oldest sin and deepest crime is the isolation of minority children - black children, in particular - in schools that are not only segregated but shamefully unequal.

In the Brown decision, the United States Supreme Court unanimously struck down the legal and moral footing of racially segregated public education in this country.

I think a lot of people don't have any idea of how deeply segregated our schools have become all over again. Most textbooks are not honest in what they teach our high school students.

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, in a time and place where no one was saying, 'Look how far we've come,' because we hadn't come very far, to say the least. Although Jackson's population was half white and half black, I didn't have a single black friend or a black neighbor or even a black person in my school.

It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.

Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem.

I drank from colored water fountains and from the white water fountain just to see what it was like when I was a kid. What shocks me is that these kids today don't realize that this happened in many of our lifetimes.

Washington, D.C. in 1942 was not the easiest place in the world for a Negro to get along.

The last state to admit a black student to the college level was South Carolina.

I was one of the first three black students to go to an all-white school in Tennessee.

The suggestion that Negroes should be treated as equals to white men woke some of the deepest and ugliest fears in the American mind

In the South the white men used to call all Black men “boy” until they got to be old enough to call them “uncle.” It was sex-the feat of sexual competition. When they used to get liquored up and talk they would always say, “The schoolroom leads to the bedroom” to justify school segregation.

The time to end racial segregation in the South is upon us now.

When we hear of any Negro trying to get into a white school in Mississippi, you can be sure it is a Negro who has just been imported for that purpose.

We still have two separate public school systems in this country. It’s not [any longer] based on race; it’s based on economics, but that’s related to race.