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Where do you think I'd be next week if I didn't know how to shout and holler and make the public take notice? I'd be poor and I'd probably be down in my home town, washing windows or running an elevator and saying
-Muhammad Ali
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I imagine one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, they will be forced to deal with pain.
-James Baldwin
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Racism is an ism to which everyone in the world today is exposed; for or against, we must take sides. And the history of the future will differ according to the decision which we make.
-Ruth Benedict
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Whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior. Same with blacks. They must be made to realize that they are also human, not inferior.
-Steve Biko
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The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line -- the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea. It was a phase of this problem that caused the Civil War.
-W. E. B. Du Bois
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Racism? But isn't it only a form of misanthropy?
-Joseph Brodsky
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I wasn't always black... There was this freckle, and it got bigger and bigger.
-Bill Cosby
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When Negroes are average, they fail, unless they are very, very lucky. Now, if you're average and white, honey, you can go far. Just look at Dan Quayle. If that boy was colored he'd be washing dishes somewhere.
-Annie Elizabeth Delany
Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years, 1993
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If my theory of relativity is proven successful, Germany will claim me as a German and France will declare that I am a citizen of the world. Should my theory prove untrue, France will say that I am a German and Germany will declare that I am a Jew.
-Albert Einstein
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I graduated pretty quickly. When I was eleven or twelve a close friend of the family got lynched. I guess he was about forty years old, married, and we used to play with his kids. I remember the Saturday night a bunch of white men beat him to death at the Decatur fairgrounds because he sassed back a white woman. They just left him dead on the ground. Everyone in town knew it but never said a word in public. I went down and saw his bloody clothes. They left those clothes on a fence for about a year. Every Negro in town was supposed to get the message from those clothes and I can see those clothes now in my mind's eye.... But nothing was said in public. No sermons in church. No news. No protest. It was as though this man just dissolved except for the bloody clothes.... Just before I went into the Army I began wondering how long I could stand it. I used to watch the Saturday night sport of white men trying to run down a Negro with their car, or white gangs coming through town to beat up a Negro.
http://www.africawithin.com/bios/medgar_evers.htm
-Medgar Evers
quoted in The Martyrs: Sixteen Who Gave Their Lives for Racial Justice by Jack Mendelsohn
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In the racial picture things will never be as they once were. History has reached a turning point, here and over the world.
response to Mayor Allen Thompson's steadfast refusal to appoint a biracial committee to negotiate grievances regarding segregation of public facilities and discriminatory hiring in municipal jobs
-Medgar Evers, said in Jackson's Mississippi first direct television broadcast from a black., 1963
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When a black Jacksonian looks about his home community, he sees a city of over 150,000, of which 40% is Negro, in which there is not a single Negro policeman or policewoman, school crossing guard, or fireman.
-Medgar Evers, 1963
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I am black: I am the incarnation of a complete fusion with the world, an intuitive understanding of the earth, an abandonment of my ego in the heart of the cosmos, and no white man, no matter how intelligent he may be, can ever understand Louis Armstrong and the music of the Congo.
-Frantz Fanon
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What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.
-Jean Genet
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As the global expansion of Indian and Chinese restaurants suggests, xenophobia is directed against foreign people, not foreign cultural imports.
-E. J. Hobsbawm
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Racism as a form of skin worship, and as a sickness and a pathological anxiety for America, is so great, until the poor whites -- rather than fighting for jobs or education -- fight to remain pink and fight to remain white. And therefore they cannot see an alliance with people that they feel to be inherently inferior.
-Jesse Jackson
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I realize that I'm black, but I like to be viewed as a person, and this is everybody's wish.
-Michael Jordan
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It is incontestable and deplorable that Negroes have committed crimes; but they are derivative crimes. They are born of the greater crimes of the white society.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., Address to Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Atlanta, 16 August 1967
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Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat;
But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
tho' they come from the ends of the earth!
-Rudyard Kipling
The Ballad of East and West
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As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it -- whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, that white man is trash.
-Harper Lee
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Racism is when you have laws set up, systematically put in a way to keep people from advancing, to stop the advancement of a people. Black people have never had the power to enforce racism, and so this is something that white America is going to have to work out themselves. If they decide they want to stop it, curtail it, or to do the right thing... then it will be done, but not until then.
-Spike Lee
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And so this is Xmas for black and for white, for yellow and red, let's stop all the fight.
-John Lennon
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He (Bob Marley) had this idea, it was kind of a virologist idea, he believed he could cure racism and hate, literally cure it by injecting music and love into people's lives. One day he was scheduled to perform at a peace concert, gunmen came to his house and shot him down. Two days later he walked out on that stage and sang. Somebody asked him why. He said the people who were trying to make this world worse are not taking a day off. How can I? Light up the darkness.
-Bob Marley
Movie I Am Legend story told by character Robert Neville M.D., played by Will Smith
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A child born to a Black mother in a state like Mississippi has exactly the same rights as a white baby born to the wealthiest person in the United States. It's not true, but I challenge anyone to say it is not a goal worth working for.
-Thurgood Marshall
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Anti-Semitism is a horrible disease from which nobody is immune, and it has a kind of evil fascination that makes an enlightened person draw near the source of infection, supposedly in a scientific spirit, but really to sniff the vapors and dally with the possibility.
-Mary McCarthy
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Books about Racism
