racial injustice Quotes

“Maybe one day whites and blacks can be real friends, but right now the country ain’t built that way . . . The trouble is, down here in Mississippi, it costs too much to find out . . . So I think you’d better not try.”

″[Little Man] ran frantically along the road looking for a foothold and, finding one, hopped onto the bank, but not before the bus had sped past enveloping him in a scarlet haze while laughing white faces pressed against the bus windows.”

“They also said that slavery was good for us because it taught us to be good Christians—like the white people.” She sighed deeply, her voice fading into a distant whisper. “But they didn’t teach us Christianity to save our souls, but to teach us obedience. They were afraid of slave revolts and they wanted us to learn the Bible’s teachings about slaves being loyal to their masters.”

“I’m a Southerner, born and bred, but that doesn’t mean I approve of all that goes on here, and there are a lot of other white people who feel the same.”

“You’ll make this your last cry. You’re a warrior on the battlefield for your Lord. God’s warriors don’t cry, ‘cause they trust that he’s always by their side.”

“After three full days inside Central, I know that integration is a much bigger word than I thought.”

“You’ve gotta learn to defend yourself. You kids should have been given some training in self-defense . . . It’s never too late. It takes a warrior to fight a battle and survive. This here is a battle if I’ve ever seen one.”

“It felt as though we always had a white foot pressed against the back of our necks.”

“It felt as though we always had a white foot pressed against the back of our necks.”

“Black folks aren’t born expecting segregation, prepared from day one to follow its confining rules. Nobody presents you with a handbook when you’re teething and says, ‘Here’s how you must behave as a second-class citizen.’ Instead, the humiliating expectations and traditions of segregation creep over you, slowly stealing a teaspoonful of your self-esteem each day.”

“With the passage of time, I became increasingly aware of how all of the adults around me were living with constant fear and apprehension . . . I was feeling more and more vulnerable as I watched them continually struggle to solve the mystery of what white folks expected of them. They behaved as though it were an awful sin to overlook even one of those unspoken rules and step out of ‘their place,’ to cross some invisible line. And yet lots of discussions in my household were about how to cross that line, when to cross that line, and who could cross that line without getting hurt.”

“I ran to my room and fell onto the bed, burying my face in the pillow to hide the sobs that wrenched my insides. All my disappointment over not getting into Central High and the mob chase as well as the big sudden changes in my life over the past few weeks came crashing in on me.”

“In any society built on institutionalized racism, race-mixing doesn’t merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race-mixing proves that races can mix—and in a lot of cases, want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race-mixing becomes a crime worse than treason.”

“We black men have failed to protect our women since the time of slavery. We stay here in the South and are broken, or we run away and leave them alone to look after the children and themselves.”

″ Twelve white men say a black man must die, and another white man sets the date and time without consulting one black person. Justice? ”

“So each time a male child is born, they hope he will be the one to change this vicious circle—which he never does. Because even though he wants to change it, and maybe even tries to change it, it is too heavy a burden because of all the others who have run away and left their burdens behind.”

“Y’all asking a lot, Mr. Wiggins, from a poor old n***** who never had nothing.”

“They sentence you to death because you were at the wrong place at the wrong time, with no proof that you had anything at all to do with the crime other than being there when it happened. Yet six months later they come and unlock your cage and tell you, We, us, white folks all, have decided it’s time for you to die, because this is a convenient date and time.”

“I teach because it is the only thing that an educated black man can do in the South today. I don’t like it; I hate it.”

“Me, Mr. Wiggins. Me. Me to take the cross. Your cross, nannan’s cross, my own cross. Me, Mr. Wiggins. This old stumbling n*****. Y’all axe a lot, Mr. Wiggins.”

“I have been living in this country nine years longer than you have. Do you realize that? Yet I am prevented by law from becoming a citizen. I am prevented by law from owning land. I am now separated from my family without cause.”

“It is a common custom, in the part of Maryland from which I ran away, to part children from their mothers at a very early age. Frequently, before the child has reached its twelfth month, its mother is taken from it, and hired out on some farm a considerable distance off, and the child is placed under the care of an old woman, too old for field labor. For what this separation is done, I do not know, unless it be to hinder the development of the child’s affection toward its mother, and to blunt and destroy the natural affection of the mother for the child. This is the inevitable result.”

“If the lineal descendants of Ham are alone to be scripturally enslaved, it is certain that slavery at the south must soon become unscriptural; for thousands are ushered into the world, annually, who, like myself, owe their existence to white fathers, and those fathers most frequently their own masters.”

“I speak advisedly when I say this,—that killing a slave, or any colored person, in Talbot county, Maryland, is not treated as a crime, either by the courts or the community.”

“You can only be destroyed by believing that you really are what the white world calls a nigger.”

“The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them.”

“Neither civilized reason nor Christian love would cause any of those people to treat you as they presumably wanted to be treated; only the fear of your power to retaliate would cause them to do that, or seem to do it, which was (and is) good enough.”

“God ... is white. ”

“And when I sat at Elijah’s table and watched the baby, the women, and the men, and we talked about God’s—or Allah’s—vengeance, I wondered, when that vengeance was achieved, What will happen to all that beauty then?”

“White people cannot, in the generality, be taken as models of how to live.”

“We cannot be free until they are free.”

“Negroes do not, strictly or legally speaking, exist in any other [country]. ”

“Black has become a beautiful color—not because it is loved ... because it is feared.”

″ ‘Being black doesn’t mean being stupid.’ Lord, how good it felt to speak her mind. She was through with ‘yessing’ people.”

“Well sped, my boy, before the world had dubbed your ambition insolence, had held your ideals unattainable, and taught you to cringe and bow.”

“One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body.”

“The Nation has not yet found peace from its sins; the freedman has not yet found in freedom his promised land.”

“To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line.”

“There was scarcely a white man in the South who did not honestly regard Emancipation as a crime, and its practical nullification as a duty.”

“In all our Nation’s striving is not the Gospel of Work befouled by the Gospel of Pay?”

“The keynote of the Black Belt is debt; continued inability on the part of the mass of the population to make income cover expense.”

“Only those who have watched and guided the faltering feet, the misty minds, the dull understands, of the dark pupils of these schools know how faithfully, how piteously, this people strove to learn.”

“They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then instead of saying directly, How does it feel like to be a problem?, they say, I know an excellent colored man in my town, or...”

“Oh,” thought I, “this is lucky”, but even then felt the awful shadow of the Veil, for they ate first, then I---alone.”

“I knew that my life was revolving about a world that I had to encounter and fight when I grew up.”

“Had a black boy announced that he aspired to be a writer, he would have been unhesitatingly called crazy by his pals. Or had a black boy spoken of yearning to get a seat on the New York Stock Exchange, his friends--in the boy’s own interest--would have reported his odd ambition to the white boss.”

“Then how could one live in a world in which one’s mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything?”

“I wanted a life in which there was a constant oneness of feeling with others, in which the basic emotions of life were shared.”

“I had lived so utterly isolated a life that the club filled for me a need that could not be imagined by the white members who were becoming disgusted with it, whose normal living had given them what I was so desperately trying to get.”

“We should hope not for a colorblind society but instead for a world in which we can see each other fully, learn from each other, and do what we can to respond to each other with love. That was King’s dream—a society that is capable of seeing each of us, as we are, with love. That is a goal worth fighting for.”

“Challenging these forms of racism is certainly necessary, as we must always remain vigilant, but it will do little to shake the foundations of the current system of control. The new caste system, unlike its predecessors, is officially colorblind. We must deal with it on its own terms.”

“The Supreme Court has now closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias at every stage of the criminal justice process, from stops and searches to plea bargaining and sentencing. The system of mass incarceration is now, for all practical purposes, thoroughly immunized from claims of racial bias.”

“Nooses, racial slurs, and overt bigotry are widely condemned by people across the political spectrum; they are understood to be remnants of the past, no longer reflective of the prevailing public consensus about race. ”

“There they were, strangers in someone else’s home, and then they refused to talk to their hosts or have anything human, anything intimate, to do with them.”

“There was a […] school which only in my lifetime began to accept girls who were born outside a marriage in Antigua […] it had never dawned on anyone that this was a way of keeping black children out of this school.”