Rosa Parks Quotes

I used to say, 'We've always had integration in the South... we just want it now in the daytime.

However, while we should certainly celebrate the demise of overt official racism, we must also critically examine where we are at this historical moment, recognize the many challenges ahead and reaffirm our commitment to making Brown v. Board a reality.

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

Tonight the Negro knows from his radio and television that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson [Mississippi] he cannot even drive a garbage truck.

I learned a lot about evasiveness, and how racists could use a system to forestall equality. I also learned a lot riding those dusty roads and walking into those sullen hostile courts in Jackson, Mississippi. It just seems that unless something's pushed, unless you litigate, nothing happens.

Desegregation is a joke.

I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.

Happily, the days when overt racial discrimination and segregation were championed by social conservatives are long past.

I am for violence if non-violence means we continue postponing a solution to the American black man's problem just to avoid violence.

Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white.

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

We have defeated Jim Crow, but now we have to deal with his son, James Crow Jr., esquire.

Black America surely faces an existential crisis, but not the one imagined in the condescending news media - of somehow getting non-black America to be more just and generous. The truth is, we've already been through that, and there is nothing left to do. We're out of 'affirmative actions' of all kinds.

The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.

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

By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.

We do not show the Negro how to overcome segregation, but we teach him how to accept it as final and just.

The reason why you were allowed to get away with that in the '60s and '70s is because this country's racist administrative policies were such that rich white kids were getting exemptions. I said no exemptions.

The complete destruction of all enforced segregation is now in sight.

By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them back in the image of God and democracy.

Congress has done nothing to protect the loyal people of the South—Black or white.

The doublespeak of the American neoconservatives who conjured up the term "reverse racism" (was) to attack those who fought against White supremacy. This so-called ‘colorblind’ ideology has reversed the gains made during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and is actually commonsense among White Americans. It informs policymakers from the White House to the Supreme Court and has been used to justify the retreat from egalitarianism.

The great majority of the states look upon segregation as discrimination. And those few states that have a special problem in this respect will, in a variety of ways, slowly have to solve their problem and accept the will of the majority.

The United States Office of Education has likewise been guilty of spreading racial equality propaganda. In a report to the press, Dr. John W. Studebaker, head of the Office of Education, and his Negro assistant, Dr. Ambrose Caliver, who is racial adviser in the office of Education, called upon the colleges and universities of the South to open their doors to Negro students

Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth.