Kathryn Stockett Quotes

The Negro cannot count forever on the kind of restraint that's thus far left him free to clog the streets, disrupt traffic, and interfere with other men's rights.

I would not hesitate to say that it is unfortunate that so-called demonstrations are taking place in Birmingham at this time, but I would say in more emphatic terms that it is even more unfortunate that the white power structure of this city left the Negro community with no other alternative.

Blood will run in the streets if Negro pupils should attempt to enter Central High School.

I abhor the brutality that smears the good name of one of the fairest sections of our land. Shame on you, George Wallace.

When Thurgood Marshall went to a Southern town to try a case, he didn't know whether he would be alive at the end of the day.

I remember being at the church a few hours after the church was bombed in Birmingham, the 16th Street Baptist Church. It was very hard and very difficult to stand on that corner across the street from the church. Or to go Mississippi and search for the three civil rights workers who came up missing. There is a lot of trauma.

And in the racial climate of this country today, it is anybody's guess which of the 'extremes' in approach to the black man's problems might personally meet a fatal catastrophe first - 'non-violent' Dr. King, or so-called 'violent' me.

They came up with a civil rights bill in 1964, supposedly to solve our problem, and after the bill was signed, three civil rights workers were murdered in cold blood. And the FBI head, Hoover, admits that they know who did it, they've known ever since it happened, and they've done nothing about it. Civil rights bill down the drain.

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

The only politician anybody ever believed was Kennedy, anyway. Kennedy, Martin Luther King - civil rights always turns out in bloody war. Where's his dream now? When is a change going to come - as Sam Cooke said - for blacks in America? Anyone who does tell the truth gets a bullet in the head, y'know what I mean?

The time for running has come to an end. You tell them white folk in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!

Let us say boldly, that if the total slum violations of law by the white man over the years were calculated and compared with the lawbreaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man.

I believe when a negro church is bombed, that a white church should be bombed.

Let the Negro march. Let him make pilgrimages to city hall. Let him go on freedom rides. And above all, make an effort to understand why he must do this. For if his frustration and despair are allowed to continue piling up, millions of Negroes will seek solace and security in black-nationalist ideologies. And this, inevitably, would lead to a frightening racial nightmare.

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

I remember being infuriated from the top of my head to the tip of my toes the first time a screen was put around Bob Carter and me on a train leaving Washington in the 1940s.

I think all of us thought that by the '70s, at the latest the '80s, all the world's problems would be solved and everyone would be getting along fine. And instead we saw that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated that year, Robert F. Kennedy died. We saw that it was going to be a lot more difficult than I think we had thought.

Activists are killed in Mexico.

You have to understand the Newark Riots - a lot of people understand that the pain was the initial explosion of anger and alienation, but after that, the response, sending the National Guard troops - a lot of violence was carried out and perpetrated by those who were allegedly coming here to protect residents.

If America don't come around, we're gonna' burn it down.

My earliest memories are of the civil rights era. My earliest experiences were rage.

In the combat between the emerging Negroes of the South and the ruling white trash, I sympathize greatly with the Negro.

Mr. President, the Black masses are restless and we are going to march on Washington.

Riot is the voice of the unheard.