School Desegregation Quotes

Our schools are more segregated today than they have ever been since 1968. The schools that I visit hardly have any white students…. Schools that had desegregated, are now resegregating.

I have consistently opposed forced bussing to achieve integration.

Students of color who attended integrated schools in the decades immediately following Brown were more likely to graduate high school, go to college, earn higher wages, live healthier lifestyles, and not have a criminal record than their peers in segregated schools.

School integration did not come to be the day after the Brown ruling was issued. Progress took years, and it took passion, strength, and courage from a large group of committed individuals.

Even in the '80s and '90s, many white Southerners were still bitter about court decisions that required racial integration of the schools. It wasn't that they were outwardly opposed to white and black people attending school together, it was that the rulings threatened their proud identity as independent Southerners.

In approaching this problem [school desegregation], we cannot turn the clock back...

When population shifts - brought about by fair housing laws, affirmative action and landmark school desegregation rulings - political power is challenged as well.

In the South the white men used to call all Black men “boy” until they got to be old enough to call them “uncle.” It was sex-the feat of sexual competition. When they used to get liquored up and talk they would always say, “The schoolroom leads to the bedroom” to justify school segregation.

I think in some cases busing did improve the situation in some areas; in some cases it didn't. We had busing in St. Louis, and it has been ended and we are using other methods of trying to better integrate the schools.

The Problem We All Live With

Fifty-four years ago, I was an 8-year-old boy living in rural Kentucky when the schools were desegregated. I walked into a white school where I was not wanted nor welcomed.

I have a father who was the first black student at his junior high and high school and had to do a lot to get to that point.

I am opposed to busing for the purpose of achieving racial balance in our schools.

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

The point we must aim at is to obtain admittance for our children to the nearest and the best schoolhouse.

School desegregation cases overturned not only the constitutional precedents built up over three quarters of a century but the social structure of an entire region ... Desegregation decrees have all the qualities of social legislation ...

My parents lived in a poor rural community on the Eastern Shore, and schools were still segregated. And I remember when lawyers came into our community to open up the public schools to black kids.

The abolition of the separate school system in the south raises serious practical problems.... We face the abolition of the public school system. Boldness is essential but wisdom is indispensable.

The patter of their feet as they walk through Jim Crow barriers to attend school is the thunder of the marching men of Joshua, and the world rocks beneath their tread.

In 1974, when the city of Boston was desegregating its schools, I watched the news with my dad and saw the police escorts in riot gear, the protesters screaming at the buses, small frightened faces in their windows.

This is the first indication I have ever had that there is a God.

The NAACP was even considering earlier this summer reassessing their position on school integration.

I was one of the first three black students to go to an all-white school in Tennessee.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race

There will be no forced integration in Virginia. If Federal troops are sent into Virginia, they will patrol the halls of empty schools.