John A. Powell Quotes

Our nation's oldest sin and deepest crime is the isolation of minority children - black children, in particular - in schools that are not only segregated but shamefully unequal.

In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.

Black people must address itself to the causes of poverty. That's oppression in this country.

Tonight the Negro knows from his radio and television that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson [Mississippi] he cannot even drive a garbage truck.

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized: FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.

With segregation, with the isolation of the injured and the robbed, comes the concentration of disadvantage. An unsegregated America might see poverty, and all its effects, spread across the country with no particular bias toward skin color. Instead, the concentration of poverty has been paired with a concentration of melanin.

One consequence of racism and segregation is that many American whites know little or nothing about the daily lives of African Americans. Black America's least-understood communities are those poor, hyper-segregated places we once called ghettos. These neighborhoods are not far away, but they might as well be on the moon.

When I worked as a prosecutor in Richmond, Virginia in the 1990s, that city, like so much of America, was experiencing horrific levels of violent crime. But to describe it that way obscures an important truth: for the most part, white people weren't dying; black people were dying. Most white people could drive around the problem.

If you grow up in the South Bronx today or in south-central Los Angeles or Pittsburgh or Philadelphia, you quickly come to understand that you have been set apart and that there's no will in this society to bring you back into the mainstream.

We all stand on the shoulders of our ancestors. We're in a relay race, relying on the financial and human capital of our parents and grandparents. Blacks were shackled for the early part of that relay race, and although many of the fetters have come off, whites have developed a huge lead.

Now we maintain that we cannot be afford to be concerned about 6 percent of the children in this country, black children, who you allow to come into white schools. We have 94 percent who still live in shacks. We are going to be concerned about those 94 percent.

My father passed away a few days before my election. This man, an African American born to a poor single mother in 1936 in the South, would worry in the last years of his life that he had better life chances when he was growing up than a young man born in the same circumstances would have today.

If the Negro in the ghetto must eternally be fed by the hand that pushes him into the ghetto, he will never become strong enough to get out of the ghetto.

There are still some black youth growing up in ghettoes in this country who will never know a white person—not even speak to one.

We still have two separate public school systems in this country. It’s not [any longer] based on race; it’s based on economics, but that’s related to race.

The dysfunction of African-Americans is directly related to the fact that African-Americans as a racial group are no longer needed to bolster the economy as they were in slavery days.

Visible minorities lead in education but trail in income.

Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.

African American Communities are absolutely in the worst shape that they've ever been before. Ever, ever, ever.

You have to start with slavery because those abuses have never been eradicated. You know, people are not living in slums because they voted to. You know, their children are not in jail because they wanted them to. You know, these are the results of a people who have been oppressed and suffer national oppression, you know.

At the core of conservative social policy about race are old ideas that link racial inequality to non-traditional family formation and its attendant culture of poverty.

While many Americans agree that 'the system is rigged' economically, few are aware of the ways in which racial inequality has been structured and embedded in our society. This is why candid, fact-based discussions about racial inequality are so desperately needed.

The default of our society is the reproduction of racial inequality. I mean, that's what it does; that's what it's been doing for hundreds of years.

Take a walk around many of our cities and you will find areas of deprivation, high worklessness and educational failure only yards from areas of prosperity and employment.