Arthur Ashe Quotes

You Negroes are not willing to admit it yet, but integration will not work. Why, it is against the white man's nature to integrate you into his house.

I think everyone should understand history of segregation the same way we had to go to school and read about George Washington. I believe this generation should know their history and they should know that the struggle's not over yet. For instance, you can't get the cover of a magazine if your skin is too dark.

To be Negro in America is to hope against hope.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

When I was in high school if you were black and lived in Detroit, and you wanted to drive down to Florida to go on vacation, you had to plan to drive all the way through, because you couldn't stop in a hotel all the way through South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. We can't even fathom such a thing now, can we?

I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice.

When you're white, the sky's the limit. When you're black, the limit's the sky.

One hundred years ago, the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin.

The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

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.

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 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.

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones.

Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights were turning the Constitution into a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.

When we finally got school buses for African American students in Georgia, the state legislature ordained that the front bumpers be painted black. Not even the school busses could be equal.

I couldn't see why a black man wasn't allowed to drink out of the same water fountain or sit in the same bus or go to the same schools as a white guy.

It’s no disgrace to be black, but it’s often very inconvenient.

I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

We have seen the mere distinction of color made in the most enlightened period of time, a ground of the most oppressive dominion ever exercised by man over man.

The Negro fought and bled and died in every war the white man waged, and he still won't give you justice. You nursed his baby and cleaned behind his wife, and he still won't give you freedom; you turned the other cheek while he lynched you and raped your women, but he still won't give you equality.

Since integration is so slow, and the white man knows the problem must be solved, the only thing that he can do tomorrow is, is separate, because we're already separated.

I think every Negro over fifty should get a medal for putting up with all that crap.

They don't let many black people in the governor's mansion in Alabama, unless they're cleaning.

The white man is going to keep you integration-minded Negroes cooped up here in America, and when you discover that the white man is a trickster, a devil, that he has no intentions of integrating, then you Negroes will run wild.