Richard Benjamin Quotes

I don’t have a white community; that doesn’t exist in Detroit. We are surrounded by 80 percent white suburbs.

Nationwide, 1 in 3 black men can expect to serve time behind bars, but the rates are far higher in segregated and impoverished black communities.

It's not unusual for socio-economic, even racial or ethnic, groups to cluster.

Tonight the Negro knows from his radio and television that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson [Mississippi] he cannot even drive a garbage truck.

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.

We are still a nation deeply divided by race and class.

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.

I am prepared to oppose a Jim Crow army till I rot in jail.

A lot of times, when you have a story of minorities in America, it's always this super, oppositional thing. It's segregation, it's the racism, and those are the hard facts of the story.

I think there's sometimes too much attention to a few people who do hold extreme views. Most Americans go about their lives living in communities that are increasingly multiethnic, increasingly multi-religious. And they are welcoming of people who are not like themselves. Now, I don't have rose-colored glasses about America, because I grew up in the segregated South. But I watch it every day. I think that Americans are very tolerant people.

Crisis' seems to be too mild a word to describe conditions in countless African-American communities. It is beyond crisis when in the richest nation in the world, African Americans in Harlem live shorter lives than the people of Bangladesh, one of the poorest nations of the world.

We were segregated throughout the community, and it was pretty brutal, actually. It didn't appear to be, on the surface.People got along and we had great relationships, but there was discrimination that impacted adversely the ability of the African-American community to progress. People did not - were in denial about that fact.

The interesting thing about Georgia is, Atlanta is teeming with middle-class black people and black people with money - and yet there is still segregation.

There are some people who say that they’re concerned only with poverty but not inequality. But I don’t think that is a sustainable thought. A lot of poverty is, in fact, inequality because of the connection between income and capability—having adequate resources to take part in the life of the community.

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.

I think Hollywood is incredibly segregated. I've never seen any place like it. The gatekeepers who are the most progressive activists inspired to make the world better... they're better people, right? They're segregated. It's self segregated in some cases, but there's nobody Black in charge of anything in Hollywood.

Yet people in general will say they like colored men as well as any other, but in their proper place.

In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what whites looked like.

Why throw money at problems? That is what money is for. Should the nation's wealth be redistributed? It has been and continues to be redistributed to a few people in a manner strikingly unhelpful.

White individuals that have been going to jail. Segregation still exists; discrimination still exists. A few isolated white people whose individual acts are designed to eliminate this, that or, or the next thing but, yet, it is never eliminated is in no way impressive to me.

Not a state within a state, but the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is, is saying that the black man, since the white man, has found it impossible to bring about integration, other than toke on a ta - other than on a token basis, and which proves that the, the two of us, the ex-slave and the master, can't live in the same house as equals.

Let me speak frankly: separate but equal is a fraud. It is the language that tried to push Rosa Parks to the back of the bus. It is the motif that determined that black and white people could not possibly drink from the same water fountain, eat at the same table or use the same toilets.

I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination... Government should not break up a neighborhood on a numerical basis. As soon as the Government does, the white folks flee.

People in apartheid South Africa can tell you that God cursed black people when they cursed Him. And so the hermetic people were condemned to be drawers of water and of wood.

The black man in North America was economically sick and that was evident in one simple fact: as a consumer, he got less than his share, and as a producer gave least. The black American today shows us the perfect parasite image - the black tick under the delusion that he is progressing because he rides on the udder of the fat, three-stomached cow that is white America.