Bob Beckel Quotes

The only ways to pass the Southern barriers to voting was to show a white skin

In my home county—Lowndes County, Alabama--in 1964 Blacks were 80 percent of the population. Not one Black was registered to vote—Not one!!!

He missed that whole civics lesson about slavery or Jim Crow

My mother was born into a segregated America. How crazy is that?

In Windsor in the forties, and even up into the fifties and sixties, if you were black, you had to sit in the balcony of the theatres, and you couldn't buy property in most places.

There are still courses in the United States that I am not allowed to play because of the color of my skin.

In the South in the 1960’s you lived in a state of terrorism if your skin was black.

I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes.

It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country…. The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to Hell!

The scars of racism still remain deeply imbedded in America.

Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

Never did I think I would live to see the day Jim Crow was resurrected, making repeat appearances in the South. And he has packed his bags, and he has moved North. Something is wrong.

We've done a very poor job at really reflecting on our legacy of racial inequality... You see it in the South, but it's everywhere.

When Oregon was founded as a state in 1857, its constitution explicitly banned Black people from visiting, living and owning property here.

Many thought that the abolition of slavery, the end of Jim Crow, and the legislative progress of the Civil Rights Era, among other watershed moments, would have fundamentally done away with the racist structures that have long oppressed black people. However, we know that has been far from the case.

I wanted to remind myself and others of the old Jim Crow, so that we can remind ourselves that we're still living in the new Jim Crow. I feel it's important to dress in the fashion of the times.

I was born in a ghetto on the North Side of Pittsburgh. I was born as Emmett Till was dying and the civil rights era was being born.

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.

America in its entirety is segregationist and is racist. It's more camouflaged in the north, but it's the same thing.

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.

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.

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

For a black male, the sound of the blues is pre-Civil Rights. It's oppression.

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.