Harold Washington Quotes

There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.

We still have many neighborhoods that are racially identified. We still have many schools that even though the days of state-enforced segregation are gone, segregation because of geographical boundaries remains.

Atlanta's a good example of a city that's quite sprawling, where there's a sharp division between where blacks and whites live, between where low-income and high-income families live.

The separate water foundations, park benches, bathrooms and restaurants of the Jim Crow South startled me. These experiences motivated my lifelong study of the status of African Americans and the sources of improvement in that status.

The freeways create economic and racial borders in Los Angeles. South of Interstate 10 is one group of people, west of the 10 another, and south of the 405 North yet another.

I drank from colored water fountains and from the white water fountain just to see what it was like when I was a kid. What shocks me is that these kids today don't realize that this happened in many of our lifetimes.

I was never exposed to a great deal of racism, but the Chicago I grew up in was very, very segregated.

Dallas was a Black and White society at that time; it didn't have the diversity it has now.

Our schools are more segregated today than they have ever been since 1968. The schools that I visit hardly have any white students…. Schools that had desegregated, are now resegregating.

We insist that educationally and socially we maintain a segregated society …

I don’t have a white community; that doesn’t exist in Detroit. We are surrounded by 80 percent white suburbs.

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.

Suburban subdivisions encouraged buyers to live with their “own kind,” constantly sorting people by religion, ethnicity, race, and class.

The extraordinary nature of individual black achievement in formerly white domain certainly does suggest that the old Jim Crow is dead, but it doesn't necessarily mean the end of racial caste - if history is any guide, it may have just taken a different form.

Chicago's one of the most segregated cities in America. Everybody lives in their own silos and vacuums.

Growing up in Georgia, it was sort of the last place to jump on the bandwagon of the integrated frontier. I have aunts and uncles and grandparents that experienced the 'whites only' and segregated schools.

One thing that people outside Chicago need to understand is that the city is not just one thing. It is one city, but it is huge and sprawling. And historically, it has been one of America's most segregated cities.

Chicago is highly segregated, a fact that both causes and compounds the problems we face in bringing an end to violence.

I am not naive, and I do realize that racism is alive and well in the United States of America. I am also fully aware that when segregation ended, we didn't all live happily ever after. No one can convince me, however, that life in America would be better if blacks and whites had stayed separate and unequal.

It took the United States Army to get one Negro into the University of Mississippi; it took troops to get a few Negroes in the white schools at Little Rock and another dozen places in the South.

Most middle-class Americans, even working-class Americans, encounter each other across racial lines all the time, but it gets really hard-core when you get into that witches' brew that is the combination of race and poverty.

Hillary Clinton's been talking about the inner cities for 25 years. Nothing's going to ever happen.

If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States - that is to say, they will owe their origin not to the equality but to the inequality of conditions.

Detroit was an exaggeration of what was going on across the country. You could see the divisions, even within the Civil Rights Movement of that period. At the same time that Martin Luther King was talking about his dream, Malcolm X gave his most famous address in Detroit during that same period, "The Message To The Grass Roots," dismissing the notion of integration.

Michigan is very racially separated and the city of Detroit itself is 84 percent African-American and the surrounding suburbs are 86 percent White.