Medgar Evers Quotes

In my home county—Lowndes County, Alabama--in 1964 Blacks were 80 percent of the population. Not one Black was registered to vote—Not one!!!

We've got a larger than usual police force. Its twice as big as any city of our size. They [Blacks attempting to vote] won't have a chance.

The closer a Negro got to the ballot box, the more he looked like a rapist.

The only ways to pass the Southern barriers to voting was to show a white skin

I was born in Decatur, was raised there, but I never in my life was permitted to vote there.

So here we are, just two months away from the election, with more and more examples that modern day Jim Crowe laws are alive and well in the state of Florida.

Democrats in Louisville were led by Courier-Journal editor Henry Watterson and were implacably opposed to blacks voting.

Negroes could not vote in those days. When I went to Massachusetts and ran for office, it was the first time in my life that I ever voted.

There is no reason to equivocate or lie about it. The Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890 was held for no other reason than to eliminate the nigger from politics…let the world know it just as it is.

I'd been in jail, and I'd been beat. I had been to a voter registration workshop, you know, to - they were just training and teaching us how to register, to pass the literacy test.

Black men and women were not allowed to register to vote. My own mother, my own father, my grandfather and my uncles and aunts could not register to vote because each time they attempted to register to vote, they were told they could not pass the literacy test.

I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.

History did not end in 1965. Largely because of the Voting Rights Act, voting tests were abolished, disparities in voter registration and turnout due to race were erased and African-Americans attained political office in record numbers.

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

The voting business in the South will regulate itself.

President Bush blames the LA riots on the 60's. Which 60's is he talking about the 1960s or the 1860s when Lincoln freed the slaves?

It is bad enough that North Carolina should have the only nigger Congressman. It is sufficiently humiliating to the white people of the Second district; a sad enough commentary upon the political conditions that have obtained in this State

[There are] coordinated efforts across the country to intimidate and suppress the votes of racial and ethnic minorities .... Hostile officials regularly deploy the language of “fraud” and “corruption” to justify their efforts much as their counterparts at the end of the 19th century did to fully disenfranchise black voters… Although our present-day tactics are state-issued IDs, state-mandated harassment of immigrants and voter-roll purges, these are not a far cry from the poll taxes, literacy tests, residency requirements and discretionary power of local registrars that composed the political racism of a century ago. That’s not even counting the hours-long lines many minority voters confronted.

Voting discrimination still exists. Nobody doubts that.

If you seat these black buggers, the whole South will walk out.

The six of us gathered at my house, and we walked to the polls. I'll never forget it. Not a Negro was on the streets, and when we got to the courthouse, the clerk said he wanted to talk with us. When we got into his office, some 15 or 20 armed white men surged in behind us - men I had grown up with, had played with.

Republicans in the South... are trying to find ways, not so much to block black and brown people from voting, but to block black and brown people from getting people they want elected, which is a far more subtle thing to do.

Voting in our country has never been easy, and unfortunately, it has never been guaranteed for everyone. But through the work of brave civil rights leaders, some of whom died for the cause, by the early 2000s we were at a point where most, but still not all, people who wanted to vote could do so.

Jim Crow laws stripped blacks of basic rights. Despite landmark civil rights laws, many public schools were still segregated, blacks still faced barriers to voting, and violence by white racists continued. Such open racism is mostly gone in America, but covert racism is alive and well.