Emanuel Cleaver Quotes

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

I think young people don't really know that much about the Civil Rights Movement and about the history of African Americans in this country. It's not taught enough in school.

There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites.

And for far too long, the Democrats have had a monopoly on black votes in this country.

You can't say the Negro left the Republican Party; the Negro feels he was evicted from the Republican Party.

Republicans think that the NAACP is the only voice in the black community. It is a voice in the black community. But it's not the only voice.

The Democratic Party has taken the black community for granted and said, 'This is the most loyal constituency we have. They're not going anywhere.' But the Republican Party has said, 'That's the most loyal constituency Democrats have. They're not going anywhere. We've got to win without them.'

LBJ’s policies were giving American blacks hope they’d never had, they found intolerable what they had once accepted as inevitable.

Black people are taken for granted by the Democratic Party and not even sought after by the Republican Party.

To understand how Republicans lost the African American vote, we must first understand how we won the African American vote.

Blacks as a group have voted Democratic since the 1930s. The GOP has not courted them in any real way since the 1960s, focusing instead on attracting white constituencies hostile to civil rights and African-Americans in general.

The cornerstones of this country's operation are economic and political strength and power. The black man doesn't have the economic strength - and it will take time for him to build it. But right now the American black man has the political strength and power to change his destiny overnight.

This independent Negro movement is able to intervene with terrific force upon the general social and political life of the nation, despite the fact that it is waged under the banner of democratic rights ... [and] is able to exercise a powerful influence upon the revolutionary proletariat, that it has got a great contribution to make to the development of the proletariat in the United States, and that it is in itself a constituent part of the struggle for socialism.

Any time the negro becomes involved in mature political action, then the resistance of the politicians who benefit from the exploited political system as it now stands will be forced to put, exercise more violent action to deprive the negro of his mature political action.

Louis Brandeis never had the opportunity - or he never sought the opportunity I should say - to work closely with African American lawyers. He was also a Southern Democrat, you know, at a time when both parties were supportive of segregation.

[The Democratic Party]it's a party with an incredible century-and-a-half history of institutional racism.

If the Democrats have their way, African Americans will continue to feel oppressed, despised and handicapped into the indefinite future. All progress will be downplayed and every setback amplified. In this way, Democrats can continue to rely on lopsided black support at the polls.

I knew Stokely [Carmichael] and them, but when you got to that, you saw that Nina Simone started to take up their burden. She started to preach for them. She was taking on the burden of "I want to tell the people."

Black politics is redemption and transformation. It's not always pretty, but it's not always ugly either. I'll put India.Arie up against Donald Trump any day and let the people choose.

Jesse Jackson's living depends on the maintenance of an African-American victim culture

I once did a - the first piece on Malcolm X that anyone had ever seen in the - white press.

If integration will get [black man] that [respect as the human being], all right. If segregation will get him that, all right. If separation will get him that, all right.But after he gets integration and he still doesn't have this dignity and this recognition as a human being, then his problem is still not solved.

The only minority in America that's asking for integration is the so-called Negro, primarily because he is inferior, not inherently inferior, but he's economically, socially, politically inferior.

No nation has ever prospered or been blessed like the colored people in the South.

Black Americans are the only people in history who are for education instead of liberation. George Washington wasn't beating up on British for the right to open a college! The line isn't "Give me education or give me death."