Stokely Carmichael Quotes

We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.

Our nation's oldest sin and deepest crime is the isolation of minority children - black children, in particular - in schools that are not only segregated but shamefully unequal.

White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White society created it; white institutions maintain it; and white society condones it.

Sixty years after Brown v. Board of Education, it's time for us to take a hard look at the separate and unequal conditions that still exist in our schools and our communities and rededicate ourselves to fulfilling the promise of equal opportunity for all.

When a black person has no electricity, no water, they call it the ghetto. When white people have no electricity and no water, they call it camping.

When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.

I believe public education is the new civil rights battle and I support charter schools.

Speaking as a black person, welfare is the worst thing that's ever happened to us.

Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites.

It doesn't do good to open doors for someone who doesn't have the price to get in. If he has the price, he may not need the laws. There is no law saying the Negro has to live in Harlem or Watts.

School choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century.

Until we're educating every kid in a fantastic way, until every inner city is cleaned up, there is no shortage of things to do.

I have never seen any good resulting from educating the Negro.

Since the day Martin Luther King was killed, the black middle classes have almost quadrupled, but the percentage of black children living on or below the poverty line is almost the same.

There is a vast difference - a constitutional difference-between restrictions imposed by the state which prohibit the intellectual commingling of students, and the refusal of individuals to commingle where the state presents no such bar.

There's no reason why children in inner cities or rural areas do not receive the same quality education or opportunities as those in suburbs or wealthy neighborhoods. If we truly believe in giving all citizens a chance to pursue happiness and pursue their goals, then we cannot continue to marginalize entire groups of people.

I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956, with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins - I was only 16 years old - we went down to the public library trying to check out some books, and we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors. It was a public library.

The last state to admit a black student to the college level was South Carolina.

Our schools are more segregated today than they have ever been since 1968. The schools that I visit hardly have any white students…. Schools that had desegregated, are now resegregating.

I favor school integration. I do not favor mandatory busing. The only kids who were bused are the poor children. The rich parents either move or put the kid in private schools.

We still have two separate public school systems in this country. It’s not [any longer] based on race; it’s based on economics, but that’s related to race.

Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality.

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

Students who spend their lives in segregated schools can look forward to a life on the margins.

My father was born in the year 1900 in South Carolina, and he grew up at a time where being an African-American child in the American South was to be deprived of access to anything close to a reasonable education. He only had three years of formal education, but he was self-taught. He read two newspapers a day.