Otto Kerner Jr. Quotes

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.

… white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture (of private discrimination and segregation) that has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.

The U. S, Social Security Act not only takes the Afro-American for a ride, but aids immediately in perpetuating his inferior status, What we see here, as in most other 'liberal' legislation, in a further stratifying of the Negro at the bottom of the ladder of life. .

In the combat between the emerging Negroes of the South and the ruling white trash, I sympathize greatly with the Negro.

Segregation is a disease of white people, not of colored people.

I suggest that what has happened to the white Southerner is in some ways much worse than what has happened to the Negroes there ... One has to assume that he is a man like me, but he does not know what drives him to use the club, to menace with a gun, and to use a cattle prod against a woman's breasts ... Their moral lives have been destroyed by a plague called color.

The general interest both of the white man and of the negroes requires that he should be kept as near to the condition of slavery as possible’

Resolved, that the Government of the United States, the nation with its institutions, of right belong to the white men who now possess them.

Whites don’t like to see the nigger with too much … White people was afraid that money will make the nigger act like his own man.

We can solve a housing problem or we can try to solve a racial problem. But we cannot combine the two.

The South politician preaches to the poor white man, "You got more than the blacks, don't complain. You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain. And the Negro's name Is used, it is plain, For the politician's gain, As he rises to fame And the poor white remains On the caboose of the train; But it ain't him to blame -- He's only a pawn in their game.

The Negro is the same as any other minority group he is clannish and tends to select neighbors who are of the same background and race. Unless other builders opened housing to all, I could not afford the decline in sales that would result if Negroes enjoyed equal access to my houses.

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap.

Educating Negroes is pointless and dangerous. The state should ensure that tax dollars from white citizens should only go to white schools.

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

... rich white leaders of the American South defeated populism in the late 19th century, by persuading poor Whites to hate poor Blacks.

The Negro today perhaps has more political power than ever before and he is worse off than ever before. It is not votes but dollars that count in this civilization.

You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

We were received as celebrities….All we had to do was show ourselves as examples, and Blacks would switch to Pepsi…. The KKK and the other people would come and smear mud on our Pepsi Displays claiming that we were taking good jobs away from white people.

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

To pass this law and then hope that South Carolina … would do justice to the negro is absurd. She has 291,000 whites and 412,000 blacks. To pass such a law would be for the governing power to divest itself of the government and hand it over to a subject and despised caste ... The same is true, more or less, of all the South

The white race ... will be proprietors of the land, and the blacks its cultivators; such is their destiny.

The suggestion that Negroes should be treated as equals to white men woke some of the deepest and ugliest fears in the American mind

Hurricane Katrina was a disaster. It exposed the soft underbelly of America when it comes to race and class.