Oliver Tambo Quotes

Race prejudice can't be talked down, it must be lived down.

Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.

The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.

Desegregation is a joke.

Dallas was a Black and White society at that time; it didn't have the diversity it has now.

Our Constitution is color blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. The arbitrary separation of citizens, on the basis of race ... is a badge of servitude wholly inconsistent with civil freedom.

Today, Americans of all races stand side by side in Vietnam and Berlin. They died side by side in Korea. Surely they can work and eat and travel side by side in their own country.

Apartheid cannot be reformed. It has to be eliminated.

Our scientists grapple with the difficulties of placing a man on the moon, but the immediately troubling concern of our society is whether men of different races can sit together at a lunch counter.

I couldn't see why a black man wasn't allowed to drink out of the same water fountain or sit in the same bus or go to the same schools as a white guy.

Now is the time to lift our national policy from the quicksand of racial injustice to the solid rock of human dignity.

Marches alone won't bring integration when human respect is disintegratin'

I think segregation is bad, I think it's wrong, it's immoral. I'd fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don't need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that.

If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.

We were taught in school, and I was taught at home and in church, that blacks and whites were equal and we should not discriminate based on skin color, even if my school was almost entirely white.

In '42,' it's like the '40s where racial equality had come into the consciousness of a lot of people, whereas in the 1900s it was sort of a new thing.

My belief system is that you laugh at racism, and that's how it goes away.

I grew up in the 1970s, but I don't think a whole lot had changed from the '60s. Oh, it had changed in the law books - but not in the kitchens of white homes.

I feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go.

The Negro has been here in America since 1619, a total of 344 years. He is not going anywhere else; this country is his home. He wants to do his part to help make his city, state, and nation a better place for everyone, regardless of color and race.

Social equity is based on justice; politics change on the opinion of the time. The black man's skin will be a mark of social inferiority so long as white men are conceited, ignorant, unjust, and prejudiced. You cannot legislate these qualities out of the white - you must steal them out by teaching, illustration, and example.

There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.

I'll also say, yes, I think the change in black consciuosness in recent years has made me more sensitive to injustice in every area of my life.

People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same.

I, for one, would think both about how far we have come as a country and how much further we need to go to erase racism and discrimination from our society.