Josephine Baker Quotes

The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling... How can you expect the world to believe in you and respect your preaching of democracy when you yourself treat your colored brothers as you do?

I know my destiny. I was born into animosity, bigotry and hatred. We had water for white folks, and water for coloured folks. White lines, black lines. I came from Beaufort in South Carolina, and it was tougher than Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

I grew up in Houston, and I remember we had separate drinking fountains, and black people sat in the balcony of the theater... We had an African-American housekeeper growing up who was really like my second mother. I thought it was silly - hatred just because of the color of somebody's skin.

On July 4, 1805, whites in Philadelphia drove blacks out of the square facing Independence Hall… On July 4, 1834, a white mob in New York City burned down the Broadway Tabernacle because of the anti-slavery and anti-racist views of the church leaders…. On July 4, 1935, a white mob in Cannan, New Hampshire destroyed a school that was open to blacks…

The whites were really brutishly ignorant, blitheringly, so they killed people sometimes - just came into the African-American community and maimed people because they didn't agree with God's choice for the colors of the people's skin.

I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida.

There's a lot of racism still alive and still active.

You know, bigotry isn't relevant to just the South. It never was. But I'm very grateful that I don't know what it's like from experience.

I sometimes feel that racism is getting worse.

When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like it.

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.

Arizona has always been anti-black.

People have been killing because of racial differences since the time of Adam and Eve, but in this country racism has been primarily aimed at African Americans.

As an African-American, I know all too well the negative thoughts and feelings hatred and bigotry cause.

For generations, even many otherwise decent white Southerners learned to despise black people.

If white America is ready to extend complete democratic rights to colored people, there will be no race, no racial tension and no racial prejudice on either side, but we can be sure that any movement 'back to normalcy' in race relations will be bitterly resisted by colored people. It is now up to white America to make its choice...

So long as the slave remains ignorant and docile and contented he is taken care of, humored and spoken of with a contemptuous, compassionate kindness. But from the moment he exhibits the attributes of a rational being, from the moment his intellect seems likely to come into the most distant competition with that of whites, the most deadly hatred springs up—not in the black, but in his oppressors.

From the time we entered Texas, everywhere we go there’s the smell of hatred in the air – the arrogant hatred of whites, the silent hatred of blacks.

The fuse of racial hatred is long and winds through all of Europe.

The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again.

For every Farrakhan who riles and poisons black America, there are twenty white bigots who seek to take us into organized murder and mayhem.

We can sugar-coat this any way we want to, but the reality is that there are some people who just don’t want a Black President.

If you seat these black buggers, the whole South will walk out.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

There's a little racism out here, always was, and always will be.