Jackie Robinson Quotes

In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.

Freedom in America was not always flat. Racism made it un-flat, so that some people had privileges over other people.

Racism is systemic: It's oppression that's built into the laws, legislation, into the way neighborhoods are policed, and into job opportunities and health care and education.

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.

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.

They [the blacks] had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

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.

In the combat between the emerging Negroes of the South and the ruling white trash, I sympathize greatly with the Negro.

He was murdered by every member of the gospel who has remained silent about racial discrimination—who has hidden behind the stained glass windows of his church.. He was murdered by every Negro who accepted segregation.

If blacks are oppressed in America, why isn't there a black exodus?

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

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

Ours has not been a racially democratic society for 300 years.

Resolved, that the Government of the United States, the nation with its institutions, of right belong to the white men who now possess them.

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

[T]he agents are white Southerners who have been influenced by the mores of the community. To maintain their status, they have to be friendly with the local police and people who have been promoting segregation.

Segregation is a disease of white people, not of colored people.

This county was formed for the white man, not for the black man.

He shatters the myth of white supremacy once and for all.

I suggest that what has happened to the white Southerner is in some ways much worse than what has happened to the Negroes there ... One has to assume that he is a man like me, but he does not know what drives him to use the club, to menace with a gun, and to use a cattle prod against a woman's breasts ... Their moral lives have been destroyed by a plague called color.

I never rode a bus because I knew I would have to sit in the back.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

He missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow

We have a long, ugly history of white supremacy in this country, ranging from Jim Crow laws to keep African Americans down to the 1924 Immigration Act to keep non-Europeans out.