Edward Brooke Quotes

While the Right of Suffrage is conceded to thousands notoriously ignorant, vicious, and drunken, ... a Constitutional denial to Black men, as such, of Political Rights freely secured to White men, is monstrously unjust and irrational.

The great majority of negroes in the South who do not vote, do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could.

I would like the Supreme Court to understand that voting rights are still a big problem in many parts of our country [America], that we don't always do everything we can to make it possible for people of color and older people and young people to be able to exercise their franchise.

I am fifty-two years of age. I am a bishop in the Anglican Church, and a few people might be constrained to say that I was reasonably responsible. In the land of my birth I cannot vote...

It could be clearly proved that by a practical nullification [by the South] of the Fifteenth Amendment the Republicans have for several years been deprived of a majority in both the House and Senate. The failure of the South to faithfully observe the Fifteenth Amendment is the cause of the failure of all efforts towards complete pacification. It is on this hook that the bloody shirt now hangs.

You can't say the Negro left the Republican Party; the Negro feels he was evicted from the Republican Party.

… we shouldn’t contort the voting process to accommodate the urban—read African American voter-turnout machine.

Minority candidates continue to overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates. As long as that is the case, the Republican National Committee, and other Republican groups, may be tempted to keep minority voters from casting their ballots, especially in light of the razor thin margins of victory by which many elections have been decided in recent years.

The 3rd leg of the strategy for GOP political supremacy has been to suppress the vote of the Democrat’s most loyal base: African Americans. On the fallacious pretext of addressing voter fraud, Republican officials in more than two dozen states introduced and passed new voting laws that that restrict voting. The most immediate impact of these laws has been to disproportionately disenfranchise Black, Latino and young voters.

Voting is crucial, and I don't give a damn how you look at it: there are efforts to stop people from voting. That's not right. This is not Russia. This is the United States of America.

Particularly in the South, efforts continue to be made to deny blacks access to the polls, even where blacks constitute the majority of the voters.

In Selma, Alabama, in 1965, only 2.1 percent of blacks of voting age were registered to vote. The only place you could attempt to register was to go down to the courthouse. You had to pass a so-called literacy test. And they would tell people over and over again that they didn't or couldn't pass the literacy test.

Black men and women were not allowed to register to vote. My own mother, my own father, my grandfather and my uncles and aunts could not register to vote because each time they attempted to register to vote, they were told they could not pass the literacy test.

Republicans in the South... are trying to find ways, not so much to block black and brown people from voting, but to block black and brown people from getting people they want elected, which is a far more subtle thing to do.

The formerly incarcerated - returning citizens - often face a cruel irony in America. Having paid their debt to society, too many are banned from the ballot box that could help them dismantle policies that essentially extend their sentences.

You can get elected to Congress without ever talking to black voters at all, and I think that's bad for the party.

I know 100 percent what it's like to have people tell you that you can't hold an office because of your color, and to have people vote based on that belief.

Racial discrimination in elections in Texas is no mere historical artifact. To the contrary, Texas has been found in violation of the Voting Rights Act in every redistricting cycle from and after 1970.

On the one hand, to suggest that white poll watchers are going to black communities threatening and provocative. On the other hand is to suggest that if that same line of vote is he also resists making a commitment to honor the winner of the campaign, that there is another agenda.

Reinvigorating the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department, making sure that in our Department of Education, where we see evidence of black boys being suspended at substantially higher rates than white boys for the same behavior, in the absence of that kind of rigorous enforcement of the nondiscrimination principle, then the long-standing biases that I believe have weakened, but are still clearly present in our society, assert themselves in ways that usually disadvantage African Americans.

I deeply understand the history of civil rights and the horrendous impact that relentless and systemic discrimination and the denial of voting rights has had on our African-American brothers and sisters. I have witnessed it.

I have no desire to vote for French politicians, and I'm not entitled to vote in Switzerland.

Any time the negro becomes involved in mature political action, then the resistance of the politicians who benefit from the exploited political system as it now stands will be forced to put, exercise more violent action to deprive the negro of his mature political action.

The international community cannot accept that whole communities are marginalized because of the color of their skin. People of African descent are among those most affected by racism. Too often, they face denial of basic rights such as access to quality health services and education. Such fundamental wrongs have a long and terrible history.

Nationwide about 1 in 7 black men are temporarily or permanently disenfranchised due to felon disenfranchisement laws.