Medgar Evers Quotes

There were lots of smart black people at Harvard before Barack Obama, but none of them ever got to head up the law review. There has been a history of discrimination.

When you allow racial disparity and institutional inequity to affect one part of the country, eventually it's coming back to get everyone.

There are not enough good jobs for the skill levels we have.

As America prepared for war in 1941, discrimination largely shut black Americans out of job opportunities in the growing defense industry.

The black unemployment rate has to be twice that of the white rate in the US. If the national unemployment rate were 6.8 percent, everyone would be freaking out. We ought to not take too much solace in the 6.8 percent, but ask ourselves what can we do to bring that down to white rates, which are below 4 percent now. Some of that has to do with education, but that's just part of the story. You find that those unemployment differentials persist across every education level. I think it means pushing back on discrimination and helping people who can't find work get into the job market.

Blacks are about seven times more likely to live in neighborhoods of concentrated poverty than whites.

Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools.

We're not willing to give black leaders second chances because, in most cases, we're not willing to give them first chances.

When white supremacy becomes institutional, it begins to harm the very people who are not simply outside of it because of their race, it begins to harm the folk who look like the folk who want to be in charge. Martin Luther King, Jr., understood this, Malcolm X understood this, James Baldwin really understood this.

Are there differences between black actors' opportunities and white actors' opportunities? Yes, there are. It's been said.

I know I got it made while the masses of black people are catchin' hell, but as long as they ain't free, I ain't free.

As far as being a deliveryman is concerned, I see nothing wrong with being a delivery man. You know, black or white or Hispanic or Chinese or whatever, you know? It's a job.

Go down to the Republican headquarters. They ain't got a single black working there. Not one.

A lot of joblessness in the black community doesn't seem to be reachable through fiscal and monetary policies. People have not been drawn into the labor market even during periods of economic recovery.

If he presents himself to vote, he runs a risk to his life. Oppressed, he can complain, but if he finds only whites among his judges… His son is excluded from the school where the descendants of Europeans come to be instructed. In theaters he cannot buy for the price of gold the right to be placed at the side of one who was his master; in hospitals he lies apart. The black is permitted to beseech the same God as whites, but not to pray to him at the same alter.

Opportunity seems to be color-coded here in America

Segregation of schools is no accident.

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.

Modern technical civilization does not seem to be as well handled by the black man as by the white man in the United States

The Negro is going to be relegated to the menial jobs and will not get his promotions because the competition is too tough.

For instance, twelve men are struggling for employment in a trade where there is only room for eight ; four are driven out of that trade, but they are not trampled out of existence. A good deal of competition merely decides what kind of work a man is to do though of course when a man can only do one kind of work, it may easily become a struggle for bare life.

We incarcerate more African-American men today than were slaves in 1850.

Most new prison construction has occurred in predominately white, rural communities, and thus a new and bizarre form of segregation has emerged in recent years. Ghetto youth are transferred from their decrepit, underfunded, racially segregated schools to brand-new high-tech prisons located in white rural counties.

You spend your whole lifetime in your occupation, actually making life clever, easy and convenient for white people. But when you have to get transportation home, you are denied an equal accommodation. Our existence was for the white man's comfort and well-being; we had to accept being deprived of just being human.

Although our rules and laws are now officially colorblind, they operate to discriminate in a grossly disproportionate fashion.