Barack Obama Quotes

Everyone who has a pair of eyes in this country understands the racial tensions and the issues we have are very serious and they're not going away. Just because we had Barack Obama as our president and, on paper, everything looks equal, it's very clearly not.

I'm asking for the vote of every single African-American citizen. You're living in poverty. Your schools are no good. You have no jobs.

About the state of black America, I've been working on that for many, many years. And [Donald Trump] said certain things in his early days about wanting to do something about it. We have a lot of violence in our neighborhoods now. We need education. And we need jobs. Is what I'm trying to say.

And yet today, half of all black children are aborted. Far more of the African-American community is being devastated by the policies of today than were being devastated by policies of slavery

I'll tell you what, our inner cities are so, so bad right now. The danger, the crime, the lack of education, no jobs. African Americans are living in hell in our - in the inner cities. I mean, they're living - they're living in hell. You walk to the store for a loaf of bread; you get shot.

The problem [ of the twenty-two million Afro-Americans] is so broad that it's going to take the inner working of all organizations.

Although much of the media have their antennae out to pick up anything that might be construed as racism against blacks, they resolutely ignore even the most blatant racism by blacks against others.

We have two boys. After George Zimmerman was found not guilty of killing Trayvon Martin, we had to explain to our older son, who was 12 at the time, how that could happen. Instead of hugging and consoling him, my husband pulled out a documentary about Emmett Till and showed it to him and started to talk about how the justice system works in this country - and how it often doesn't. From that conversation, our son wrote a short story about Trayvon Martin going to heaven to meet Emmett Till.

They came to this country they, they were Hungarians, they were Communists from a Communist country. And right now those Hungarian freedom fighters can get jobs that student sit-ins can't get. They can go and sleep and live in hotels that Martin Luther King himself can't live in.They are recognized and respected because they are fighters, not because they are sit-iners or freedom.

My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin. You know, if I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.

We have to help African American people that, for the most part, are stuck there, Hispanic American people. We have Hispanic-American people that are in the inner cities and they are living in hell.

The White House, in advancing the agenda for a [school] "choice" plan, rests its faith on market mechanisms. What reason have the black and very poor to lend their credence to a market system that has proved so obdurate and so resistant to their pleas at every turn?

Quite often when you help poor people, they don't think about the environment. They think about survival.

If, with the nation watching, three black women at three different levels can't get justice... for this community, you tell me where you're going to get it in our country.

Black people are just constantly immature in their thinking, undisciplined, and we suffer as a people. This is not about race in the sense that black people got to get something better than whites or Latinos or Asians. This is just basically that we keep complaining about what we don't have and what we can't do, and then, when we get in positions to do stuff, we fight amongst ourselves like savages.

I talked to a lot of Black Lives activists in various states. What I learned is that the relationship of police departments around the country with the black community is far, far more severe and awful than I had originally known.

The white man is too intelligent to let someone else come and gain control of the economy of his community. But you will let anyone come in and take control of the economy of your community, control the housing, control the education, control the jobs, control the businesses, under the pre-text that you want to integrate. No, you outta your mind.

They who refuse education to a black man would turn the South into a vast poorhouse, and labor into a pendulum, necessity vibrating between poverty and indolence.

There are people out there that feel there are injustices being made and happening in the USA on a daily basis.

Hillary Clinton's done a terrible job for the African-Americans.

That's how I am and how I've always looked at the world. I understood what the pavilions were before I came to Venice, and I knew that wasn't going to be enough for me. I wanted to extend this conversation into something I call urgency. There is urgency with people in crisis. Some communities - often the black community - just live in this urgency.

So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex.

What I saw in Baltimore was distressing and it tells me we need stronger policies in this country.

I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, I was involved in what the Negroes, I mean, blacks were thinking, what they were feeling.

The conditions that we are suffering force us to address the real issues that affect the life and well-being of the majority of our people. That is why the call for reparations and justice in dealing with the problems of Black people is so relevant now.