Anna Julia Cooper Quotes

Too many whites still see blacks as a group apart.

The segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.

We must preserve not only the purity of (white) blood but the purity of the government from any…amalgamation with inferior races.

This problem, which exists because of the presence of … Negroes in this country, can be permanently solved only by the physical separation of the races or by resigning ourselves to total mongrelization resulting in the destruction of both the white and black races

Have we become inoculated with prejudice of race that an American government professedly based on the principles of freedom ... can make distinctions between such citizens ... simply because of their respective races?

One drop of black blood and you're black. That was the rule. That's what kept the wall between whites and blacks was this one drop rule. So I was raised with absolutely no ambiguity about that.

Being someone that grew up in a biracial household I never really felt accepted by black people when I was a little kid, I didn't feel fully accepted by black kids and I definitely didn't feel fully accepted by white kids cause I just felt like I could never be neither one.

Some colored people so scared of whitefolks they claim to love the cotton gin.

White people have always shown their superiority over blacks with their feet, moving out of black neighborhoods with the fear that their kids will turn into one of them. And now, through the magic of MTV, damned if it didn't turn out that way!

There are still horrible things that go on because of the myth of race, but we don't have to succumb totally.

The black masses want not to be shrunk from as though they are plague-ridden. They want not to be walled up in slums, in the ghettos, like animals. They want to live in an open, free society where they can walk with their heads up, like men, and women! Few white people realize that many black people today dislike and avoid spending more time than they must about white people. This 'integration' image, as it is popularly interpreted, has millions of vain, self-exalted white people convinced that black people want to sleep in bed with them - and that's a lie!

That's just how white folks will do you. It wasn't merely the cruelty involved; I was learning that black people could be mean and then some. It was a particular brand of arrogance, an obtuseness in otherwise sane people that brought forth our bitter laughter. It was as if whites didn't know they were being cruel in the first place. Or at least thought you deserved of their scorn.

The South has not always been the friendliest place for African-Americans.

I think I was just too young to even understand what was going on. When I was still living in South Africa, there was still so much racial tension.

The present system under the control of the whites trains the Negro to be white and at the same time convinces him of the impropriety or the impossibility of his becoming white... the Negros will have no outlet but to go down a blind alley, if the sort of education which they are now receiving is to enable them to find the way out of their present difficulties.

The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.

These Negroes who go for integration and intermarriage are linking up with the very people who lynched their fathers, raped their mothers, and put their kid sisters in the kitchen to scrub floors.

It's getting almost so bad a colored man hasn't got any country.

Races are very often invented from ignorance, or for evil purposes.

In this country, these Negro leaders have Negroes sittin' - sitting down, thinking that that - there's dignity towards sitting in.

There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.

A Negro just can't be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up in the neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business, were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched.

A Klaner KKK is a cat who gets out of bed in the middle of the night and takes his sheet with him.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.