Strom Thurmond Quotes

Supporting segregation need not be racist. One can believe in segregation and believe in equality of the races.

My mother worked in the white world, but I lived almost exclusively in a black world. I don't think I had ever seen a white teacher until I got to high school.

THERE Is no power in the world--not even in all the mechanized armies of the earth, Allied and Axis—which could now force the Southern white people to the abandonment of the principle of social segregation

When I came here, there were two groups of United Church Women, one black and one white.

Race is a universal flaw in humanity. So yes, I've been in many situations where I've felt like the outsider because of the color of my skin.

All peoples are struggling to blast a way through the industrial monopoly of races and nations, but the Negro as a whole has failed to grasp its true significance and seems to delight in filling only that place created for him by the white man.

We have avoided in recent years talking openly and honestly about race out of fear that it will alienate and polarize. In my own view, it’s our refusal to deal openly and honestly with race that leads us to keep repeating these cycles of exclusion and division, and rebirthing a caste-like system that we claim we’ve left behind

America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'

[Before the Civil Rights Act of 1964], many governments in southern states forced people to segregate by race. Civil rights advocates fought to repeal these state laws, but failed. So they appealed to the federal government, which responded with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But this federal law didn't simply repeal state laws compelling segregation. It also prohibited voluntary segregation. What had been mandatory became forbidden. Neither before nor after the Civil Rights Act were people free to make their own decisions about who they associated with.

The only minority in America that's asking for integration is the so-called Negro, primarily because he is inferior, not inherently inferior, but he's economically, socially, politically inferior.

The people who invented race, who grouped us together as "black," were inventing and categorizing their ability to do something vicious and wrong.

Brown people wouldn't speak to someone who was black.

I'd like to say that Muslims are never in violence with white people. It's the black man who love you. See, you don't let him in your toilet, you don't let him in your restroom, you don't let him marry your daughter, you gotta fight. So, we're not gonna be botherin' you, you understand. Muslims don't come in, we don't have no trouble with you. It's just the integrator.

Claiming a person can't do their job because of their race is sort of like the textbook definition of a racist comment. I think that should be absolutely disavowed. It's absolutely unacceptable.

I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

Yet people in general will say they like colored men as well as any other, but in their proper place.

I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination... Government should not break up a neighborhood on a numerical basis. As soon as the Government does, the white folks flee.

White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.

This is why integration will not work. It assumes that the two races, black and white, are equal and can be made to live as one. This is not true.

We believe as much in the purity of races as we think they (the Whites) do...by advocating the purity of all races.

The prejudice of the race appears stronger in the States that have abolished slaves than in the States where slavery still exists. White carpenters, white bricklayers, and white painters will not work side by side with the blacks in the North but do it in almost every Southern State.

Segregation was ugly but we made something good out of something ugly. Since we were not welcome in other places run by White people, we were forced by circumstances to let our dollars circulate in our own communities. When you were young and I was young, there was a plethora of Black businesses. But when White folks said, "yes, come and spend your money with us," we ran downtown when we could only pass through downtown. Now downtown has our money.

Martin Luther King Jr's agenda was not to help Negroes overcome American apartheid in the south. It was to make America democracy a better place, where everyday people, from poor people who were white and red and yellow and black and brown, would be able to live lives in decency and dignity.

To change history is very slow. The first two times I came to the States - black people didn't have the right to vote.

Black people cannot and will not become integrated into American society on any terms but those of self-determination and autonomy.