Marian Wright Edelman Quotes

Discrimination is alive and soaring.

I believe discrimination still exists in society and we must fight it in every form.

The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War II for no really good reason by our most liberal President. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slavelike inequalities.

I grieve, however, that anyone could be stupid enough, in any part of our country, to arrest the Vice-Presidential candidate of a recognized party because, on his way to speak to citizens of the United States, he tried to go through a door which was marked as the entrance for people of color. It seems to me completely incredible that, in a State where colored people are allowed to enlist and go to war and be killed for their country, there should exist anything so senseless as a rule which forces human beings to enter through separate doors according to their color. It is fundamentally un-Christian and wrong.

The negro, whom a million Americans died to free, is, in present bond and future promise still a slave, whipped by circumstance, trodden under foot by iron and ineradicable prejudice; shut out forever from the opportunities which are the heritage of liberty, and, holding in his black hand the hollow parchment of his franchise as a freeman, looks through a slave's eyes at the impassable barriers which imprison him forever within the progress and achievement of a dominant and all-conquering race.

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.

Even here in Boston, we are informed, pride and prejudice have got to such a pitch, that in the very houses erected to the Lord they have built little places for the reception of colored people, where they must sit during meeting, or keep away from the house of God. Hypocrisy could hardly go further than that of preachers who could not see the evils at their door but could send out missionaries to convert the heathen, notwithstanding.

Discrimination is not a national defense strategy!

'Those people' is a bad word.

Ageism is a variation of racism or sexism, all the other isms.

Anybody who has been discriminated against, who comes from a group that's been discriminated against, knows what it's like.

Discrimination will impair democracy.

Homophobia hurts our league. Racism hurts it. Sexism hurts it.

Throughout college and law school, as well as in my career as a lawyer and police reform advocate, I've faced various toxic combinations of racism, sexism, and homophobia.

I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.

Apartheid - both petty and grand - is obviously evil.

The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal.

I never will let anyone make, maneuver me into making a distinction between the Mississippi form of discrimination and the New York City form of discrimination. It's, it's both discrimination; it's all discrimination.

She couldn't imagine why there was such a difference between those children and her. She couldn't imagine why she and all these other people with her had to be treated this way. Who decided this, and what for?

I'm discriminated against all the time.

Sexism and racism are parallel problems. You can compare them in some ways, but they're not at all the same. But they're both symptoms inside the white male power structure.

I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side a town. I want to stop that moment from coming - and it come in ever white child's life - when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites. ... I pray that wasn't her moment, Pray I still got time.

[As a child] I was very interested in books that detailed injustice and how people who are underdogs were mistreated throughout history.

If you're perpetuating discrimination, you're perpetuating inequality.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.