Thaddeus Stevens Quotes

The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks, makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience

By God, that means nigger citizenship …. That will be the last speech Lincoln will ever make.

Color had been made the mark of enslavement and was taken to be also the mark of inferiority; for prejudice does not reason, or it would not be prejudice

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.

Slavery was gone but its inequalities remained.

When education will reduce the large size of the Negro’s penis, as well as bring about the sensitiveness of the terminal fibers which exist in the Caucasian, then will it also be able to prevent the African’s birthright to sexual madness and excess.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

“Slavery always degrades labor. The white people who work with their hands are ranked with the other laborers— the slaves ... They feel that they are degraded and despised.

I hate to say this about the Republican establishment, but their view of Civil Rights is to tip the black waiter five bucks at the country club.

I tried to make the point to the [Nixon] White House that, as a party, we needed to demonstrate that we cared and were concerned about votes from African-Americans and Hispanics. I don't know where we lost track after Abraham Lincoln.

If white America is ready to extend complete democratic rights to colored people, there will be no race, no racial tension and no racial prejudice on either side, but we can be sure that any movement 'back to normalcy' in race relations will be bitterly resisted by colored people. It is now up to white America to make its choice...

If you desire negro citizenship, if you desire them to vote on an equality with yourselves, and to make them eligible to office, to serve on juries, and to adjudge your rights, then support Mr. Lincoln and the Black Republican party.

Blacks were so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

For all Sunday’s denouncing of sins, he never mentioned rotten, stinking, hell-born race prejudice. It is pitiable when we think of the thousands of white men in this country, claiming to be ministers of the gospel,—claiming to be ambassadors of God, representatives of Jesus Christ; and yet sitting down quietly in the midst of this spreading leprosy of race prejudice, and doing nothing to stay its ravages, content to have it spread, and to curse, as it is doing, both races,—embittering the Negro and debasing the white man.

George W. Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were black and poor.

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

For better or for worse, (as in some of the old marriage ceremonies,) the negroes are evidently a permanent part of the American population. They are too numerous and useful to be colonized, and too enduring and self-perpetuating to disappear by natural causes. Here they are, four millions of them, and, for weal or for woe, here they must remain.

Is there a single man among you who would vote for negro suffrage if he believed the negroes would vote the Democratic ticket? Not one, and you know it.

The post–Civil War Radical Republicans, as a group, cared very little for the black vote until they came to believe that it would help to secure their position ... against a Democratic resurgence. Once convinced that they would profit from the black vote, they passed the Fifteenth Amendment

The worst disease from which the society of our nation suffers is ... the treatment of the Negro.

This is a contest between the white man’s hope and black evil.

I have not been able to think out any solution of the terrible problem offered by the presence of the Negro on this continent, but of one thing I am sure, and that is that in as much as he is here and can neither be killed or driven away, the only wise and honorable and Christian thing is to treat each black man and each white man strictly on his merits as a man.

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the State [instead of colonizing them]? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made, and many other circumstances will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

American women who know the history of this country will always resent the fact that American men chose to enfranchise Negroes fresh from slavery before enhancing their wives and mothers.

We’d have to hide the money for this little old Civil Rights Section under another name or it would never get out of the [Congressional] Committee.