Mark Steyn Quotes

The Republican Party, in many ways, grew up as a reaction to that [ segregation], and a lot of people have misunderstood that.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

I never ever ran from the Ku Klux Klan, and I shouldn't have to run from a black man.

I'm so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights were turning the Constitution into a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.

You Negroes are not willing to admit it yet, but integration will not work. Why, it is against the white man's nature to integrate you into his house.

You can tell this by the program the federal government had to train 2,400 tractor drivers. They would have trained Negro and white together, but this man, Congressman Jamie Whitten, voted against it and everything that was decent. So, we've got to have somebody in Washington who is concerned about the people of Mississippi.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

I wasn't aware of Ku Klux Klan as I was aware of the widespread assumption that African-Americans were dumber than white people. I think my father believed that. I think everybody white did.

There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to people of white skin.... The more I feel like an American, the more the situation pains me.

The white man is going to keep you integration-minded Negroes cooped up here in America, and when you discover that the white man is a trickster, a devil, that he has no intentions of integrating, then you Negroes will run wild.

I don't sign for white people.

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

We must be clear. White supremacy is repulsive. This bigotry is counter to all America stands for. There can be no moral ambiguity.

The first thing I did [in Michigan] was join a picket line of a pizzeria in Ann Harbor in 1963 that didn't allow African Americans to eat there.

When the South has trouble with its Negroes - when the Negroes refuse to remain in their "place" - it blames "outside agitators" and "Northern interference." When the nation has trouble with the Northern Negro, it blames the Kremlin.

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.

The freedmen were not really free in 1865, nor are most of their descendants really free in 1965. Slavery was but one aspect of a race and color problem that is still far from solution here, or anywhere. In America particularly, the grapes of wrath have not yet yielded all their bitter vintage.

I was born in the late '70s and grew up in the deep South, and I was very much still of an era where racism was a casual part of white people's public and private lives, though it had been pushed more into its own little echo chamber by then. As a five year old, I saw a fully costumed Klan circle, complete with burning cross, on a town square in rural Alabama at high noon.

The South opposes the civil rights of Negroes and their protection by law. Witness lynchings where no one is punished, witness the Jim Crow laws that deny the letter and spirit of the Constitution. For democracy to have real meaning, the Negro must have the same civil rights as any other American citizen. It seems obvious that the South does not yet know what this war is all about

For black politicians, civil rights organizations and white liberals to support the racist practices of the University of Michigan amounts to no less than a gross betrayal of the civil rights principles of our historic struggle from slavery to the final guarantee of constitutional rights to all Americans. Indeed, it was practices like those of the University of Michigan, but against blacks, that were the focal point of much of the civil rights movement.

There is no negro problem. The problem is whether the American people have loyalty enough, honor enough, patriotism enough, to live up to their own constitution

I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.

My father was pretty independent. He was - he was arrested once in Nashville when he was on one of his sales trips because he had a black - guy to lunch. So that took a fair amount of courage at the time.