Claudette Colvin Quotes

I grew up segregated, but there was not much feeling of being shut out of anything.

When I was a child, it was segregated, and I couldn't go across a fence to certain parts of Gainesville.

As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.

Abhorrence of apartheid is a moral attitude, not a policy.

I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like it.

At times as a performer they segregated us in some of theatres.

What is our greatest enemy? Segregation.

Those days were very tough. All my teammates are white, and it was a different time. I couldn't go out to eat with the white players; I had to wait until someone brought something out to the bus. We couldn't stay in the same hotels.

I beg that some shadow of a colour bar, some little inequality between white and black before the law be retained.

I don't know what white people in America feel about blacks. I can only infer it from their institutions. I don't know if white Christians hate negroes, but they do not invite us to their churches. I do not know that white labor unions hate blacks, but they will not admit us. I do not know if the white educators hate us, but they do not allow us in their schools, and they do not teach us very well in the schools they do give us.

When I look back at what I had to go through in black baseball, I can only marvel at the many black players who stuck it out for years in the Jim Crow leagues because they had nowhere else to go.

I grew up in a segregated community: I couldn't go to the public schools, beaches, certain parts of town.

Segregation is not exclusion.

Separate but equal does not work.

Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit...

When I was born there were still different drinking fountains you had to drink out of.

I was being thrown to the wolves. Even though I did something great, nobody wanted to be a part of it. I was so isolated. I couldn't share it. For many years, even after Jackie Robinson, baseball was so segregated, really. You just didn't expect us to have a chance to do anything. Baseball was meant for the lily-white.

I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.

I waited at the counter of a white restaurant for eleven years. When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted.

Equality and separation cannot exist in the same space.

When I was born in 1959, the hospital in which I arrived had separate floors for black babies and white babies, and it was then illegal for blacks and whites to marry in many states.

All my life had been dominated by a sign, often invisible but no less real for that, which said: 'Reserved for Europeans Only.'

Prejudice hasn't changed to this day, not in golf. Maybe in other sports.

Being a white South African, I enjoyed the better things that that country gave to a small percentage of its population.