Michael Steele Quotes

I have often said one of the reasons more blacks don't support Republicans is because they don't trust the GOP establishment.

Republicans think that the NAACP is the only voice in the black community. It is a voice in the black community. But it's not the only voice.

What really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro ‘first’ will become the first Negro president. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.

Most African-Americans really do believe that we are voting for our better interest in voting for Democrats.

I shouldn't be the only African American Republican in the House of Representatives.

Republican Party hasn't been black friendly over the many centuries in this country.

When Obama came to power, there was a lot of talk about a post-racial America.

I recognize the Republican party as the sheet anchor of the colored man's political hopes and the ark of his safety.

Those close to Mr. Obama say he grows irritated at being misunderstood - not just by opponents who insinuate that he caters to African-Americans, but also by black lawmakers and intellectuals who fault him for not making his presidency an all-out assault on racial disparity.

I think black Americans expect too much from individual black Americans in terms of changing the status quo.

For longer than I've been involved in the political process, the Republican establishment has claimed to want to provide an alternative for the black community, yet party elite refuse to show up for the game.

If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party.

I was drawn to the power of the African American religious tradition to spur social change. Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation. It had to serve as the center of the community’s political, economic and social as well as spiritual life; it understood in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities

My number one priority is to save the Black man.

If we don't like what the Republicans do, we need to get in there and change it.... By the turn of the century it'll be a 95 percent white Republican Party and a 99 percent black Democratic Party. That's not what we need.

If someone had told me in 1963 that in 50 years we would see a Black man in the white house, I would have said “You’re crazy! You are not living in the real world.”

White identity politics has permeated our rhetoric.

To understand how Republicans lost the African American vote, we must first understand how we won the African American vote.

The projects that I end up doing, that I want to be involved with in any way, have always been projects that will be impactful, for the most part, to my people - to black people.

If white people on a larger scale really de-emphasized their whiteness, I think that would have to transform the Republican party into a more responsible party that couldn't get by on just playing into white resentment, especially white middle and working class resentment while taking care of the interests of plutocrats.

I think that seeing as much support as somebody like Obama as a black candidate running for president in a country that historically has had issues with the African-American people, and them having issues vice-versa, is a miraculous thing.

I think in order to achieve real change, we as the black community need to come up with real asks and we have to determine, what do we actually want? We obviously want some social reform, on police brutality and things like that. We also need political changes. But it's more than voting. What are we as black people asking of these politicians?

Blacks as a group have voted Democratic since the 1930s. The GOP has not courted them in any real way since the 1960s, focusing instead on attracting white constituencies hostile to civil rights and African-Americans in general.

I think the black community has a lot to work on internally with what they deem successful.

I hope 'Bamboozled' will serve as a roadmap that will assist Republicans in reaching out to women, black and Latinos. I believe once minority groups open their eyes and are not afraid to see truth, they will choose the party of Lincoln.