James Comey Quotes

He was the first FHA administrator to make statements saying that non-discriminatory housing services should be available to the American people. At the time the Southern states had laws allowing and protecting legal segregation especially in housing. The Southern field staff interpreted his instruction to be sure that both blacks and whites had access to FHA services, but they used the “separate but equal” doctrine: Provide services to both races but always in segregated housing projects. This was typical of the kinds of problems that motivated the Civil Rights Acts offered by President Kennedy in 1963 and passed by President Johnson in 1964. See {637272} for a similar Mason statement.

This was a very unusual and enlightened position for a labor leader to take at the time when most labor organizations were as racist as the rest of white society. He did not make much significant progress in racially integrating organized labor but he did not suffer for the position he took either.

The Nixon "Southern Strategy" was that if the Republican Party made extensive efforts to appeal to minorities, given the previous decades of support of white supremacy, they would only be successful with a few, whereas if the Party went in the other direction and supported the Whites fighting against the Democratic initiated, racist hated, Civil Rights Act, they would get almost all the racist Southern Democrats, which were most white males and many white females. This racist policy enabled the Republicans to gain control of the Federal Government more often than not whereas before, it was very unusual.

He was the first FHA administrator to make statements saying that non-discriminatory housing services should be available to the American people. He was not able to change the agency’s equal opportunity performance because the Southern states had laws allowing and protecting legal segregation especially in housing. The Southern staff interpreted his position to be sure that both blacks and whites had access to FHA services, but they used the “separate but equal” doctrine: Provide services to both races but always in segregated housing projects. This was typical of the kinds of problems that motivated the Civil Rights Acts offered by President Kennedy in 1963 and passed by President Johnson in 1964 See {637271} for a similar Mason statement.

The letter was written to Walsh, a partner in a major Wall Street firm who controlled the committee, American Bar Association president Bernard Segal, and past president William Gossett

This was a very courageous speech for the President to give. Senator Hubert Humphrey had proposed civil rights legislation. At the time most of the racial conservative members of Congress were Democrats and not Republicans as they would become after Civil Rights legislation actually passed in 1964. There was little possibility that the civil rights law would pass as the Southern Democrats could filibuster it in the Senate. None the less Truman supported the legislation and the principle of equal rights despite the fact that he was a Southerner and he knew he would lose the support of the conservative wing of his party.

This was written even before the end of slavery.

The decision was 5-4 and reversed a trend in which the court had been going before. Roberts and another appointment by George W. Bush tilted the majority. See {614911} for a quotation from the 4 justice dissent.

When the Democrats won the presidency, there was great fear that all the appointments that Blacks had garnered would be undone as the results of the Southern racist element of the Democratic party. The President held the line, much to the distress of his Southern supporters.

This quotation provides us with several important insights in American history. First, the Director of the FBI was an inveterate racist. Second, he felt no inhibition on sharing this discriminatory view with the Media. Third, he is yet another source for the fact that Blacks did not have a decent opportunity to get an education. There were some Southerners who maintained that they did have such an opportunity in the “Separate but Equal” segregated schools systems of the South. Hoover was not the only racist in the upper ranks of the FBI; most of the leadership was prejudiced. See {620621} and {74219} .

This was actually a very courageous statement for an American politician running for national office. As a result of the pressure of this statement President Franklin Roosevelt allowed Black enlistment in the Army Air Forces.

In Helms bizarre view, the University of North Carolina which had desegregated and had Black students and faculty was communist. In the beginning of the Cold War, the Communists of the world frequently attacked the United States for its Racial Segregation and Discrimination before the Civil Rights Bill was passed. It was one of the great shames and weaknesses of America as slavery had been earlier. Southern racists then conflated the civil rights issue and Communism. Since all communists seemed opposed to segregation, then it followed, they erroneously reasoned, that all opponents of segregation were communists. See {622174} for another of Helms vicious smears using this twisted logic.