Ed Reed Quotes

We don't have time to waste. Our communities are crumbling; our children are under siege. Failing schools and a for-profit prison-industrial complex are sucking the life out of black homes and communities. We are not going down like this!

If you talk to the Whites in Mississippi they will tell you, 'You can go to any school you want to; we don't see race.' Biggest lie ever told.

Everyone is born into a certain era. I wouldn't want to see anyone faced with the circumstances that prevailed at the time, when there were few or no alternatives.

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.

I was all-state in four sports in New Jersey, but sometimes I couldn't get served at a restaurant two blocks from my high school. There were no job opportunities then... the only thing a black youth could aspire to be was a bellboy or a pullman or an elevator operator, or, maybe, a teacher. There was a time when all we had was black baseball.

Kids that I went to school with didn't know how to interact with black people like that. There were only, like, three or four black kids in the class.

When ghetto living seems normal, you have no shame, no privacy.

South Central is just who I am. Even though I have a nice house, nice family, the rest of my generation is still in South Central L.A. My cousins, my brothers, my sisters, they don't wanna move out.

I grew up in Brownsville; most of the kids I grew up with went to jail, not Yale. If they had heard of Yale, they thought it was a lock to pick.

I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever.

I lived in a country where I couldn't live where I wanted to live. I lived in a country where I couldn't go where I wanted to eat. I lived in a country where I couldn't get a job, except for those put aside for people of my colour or caste.

I think there's an element where people get very comfortable in their ghetto. Which is fair enough.

You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop.

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

Blacks' problems lie not in the heads of white people but rather in the wasted and incompletely fulfilled lives of too many black people.

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.

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

It's important for me to go back into the ghetto, where I'm from. I still get my oxygen from there. I don't live in the ghetto anymore, but every time I go back, I'm still seeing the same things that I lived.

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.

Negro life in Washington is a promise rather than a fulfillment.

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.

However badly off a community may be at any given time, someone profits while the community remains in its present conditions. Someone owes his status to retention of the present conditions. Someone's plans and investment in the future depend on everything remaining the same.

Segregation not only separated the races in the South but it separated the South from the rest of the nation.

If crime went down 100 percent it would still be 50 percent higher than it should be.

Class prejudice is applied both the white and black poor, whose demographic traits are converging. But classism combines with latent and historic racism to create a particularly malicious brew. People are now assigned a whole range of supposedly underclass traits based on a single glimpse of skin color.