Racial Unequal Treatment Quotes

These Southerners are not bad men. They just want to be sure that their daughters will not have to go to school and sit next to a big Negro.

Not one black man is prominent in Brazil. The Negroes there are still at the bottom.

Our ears are saluted from the east and west, north and south alike saying: I like a Negro in his place. But there are no two communities which agree as to his proper place. So they have been trying to fix him in first one place and then in another; but just as soon as public sentiment changed, or he saw an opportunity, he changed to such places as he thought his intelligence, industry, courage and endurance commanded.

When I introduced a black soldier, Lt. Flap, in 1971, the Stars and Stripes banned the strip. They were having racial problems and thought it would increase the tensions.

If you grew up white before the civil rights movement anywhere in the South, all grown-ups lied. They'd tell you stuff like, 'Don't drink out of the colored fountain, dear, it's dirty.' In the white part of town, the white fountain was always covered with chewing gum and the marks of grubby kids' paws, and the colored fountain was always clean.

We could get more action in the South because the Negroes had a feeling that they were being oppressed. But you take New York, for example: they'd give Negroes little five-cent jobs here and there - and they thought they had something. And the same in Chicago and any of the metropolitan areas.

There's a history of enslaved African-Americans having to make their slave masters comfortable. This business of what we call skinning and grinning - that is something African-Americans are very much cognizant of.

My autobiography is a digressive illustration and exemplification of what race has meant in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries.

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.

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.

If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto.

If you're into social justice it's hard not to be on black people's side.

Segregation, in a sense, helped create and maintain black solidarity.

It's been a struggle for me because I had a chance to be white and refused.

Those close to Mr. Obama say he grows irritated at being misunderstood - not just by opponents who insinuate that he caters to African-Americans, but also by black lawmakers and intellectuals who fault him for not making his presidency an all-out assault on racial disparity.

In the days of segregation, when blacks were limited to certain neighborhoods, you could look around the black community and identify who the leaders were.

I grew up in a time when there was real segregation. And blacks during the 50s and so forth took a lot of responsibility for their lives because the government didn't.

Before civil rights struggles hit their towns, white southerners believed that race relations in their town was good…. The thought the agitation the result of outside forces---communism, the NAACP and Northern liberals.

I grew up in the segregated South, right here in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Even after Jim Crow was supposed to not be a part of the South anymore, there were still ways in which you couldn't get away from it. And I think once I got to Brooklyn, there was this freedom we had.

I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn't really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.

I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever.

I couldn't wait to be, you know, a Black Panther. Of course they wouldn't let me join.