Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.

I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice.

When I was born there were still different drinking fountains you had to drink out of.

When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like it.

I couldn't see why a black man wasn't allowed to drink out of the same water fountain or sit in the same bus or go to the same schools as a white guy.

Let me speak frankly: separate but equal is a fraud. It is the language that tried to push Rosa Parks to the back of the bus. It is the motif that determined that black and white people could not possibly drink from the same water fountain, eat at the same table or use the same toilets.

There was segregation everywhere. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn't even go into the same restaurants.

I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.

Apartheid - both petty and grand - is obviously evil.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

The Circle Theatre, black people had to sit in the balcony. Any theater with a balcony, black people had to sit up there. Black people couldn't check into any hotel except their own. And black people couldn't eat anywhere except in their own restaurants.

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones.

When I was born in 1959, the hospital in which I arrived had separate floors for black babies and white babies, and it was then illegal for blacks and whites to marry in many states.

Those days were very tough. All my teammates are white, and it was a different time. I couldn't go out to eat with the white players; I had to wait until someone brought something out to the bus. We couldn't stay in the same hotels.

People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same.

I grew up in Houston, and I remember we had separate drinking fountains, and black people sat in the balcony of the theater... We had an African-American housekeeper growing up who was really like my second mother. I thought it was silly - hatred just because of the color of somebody's skin.

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.

I grieve, however, that anyone could be stupid enough, in any part of our country, to arrest the Vice-Presidential candidate of a recognized party because, on his way to speak to citizens of the United States, he tried to go through a door which was marked as the entrance for people of color. It seems to me completely incredible that, in a State where colored people are allowed to enlist and go to war and be killed for their country, there should exist anything so senseless as a rule which forces human beings to enter through separate doors according to their color. It is fundamentally un-Christian and wrong.

Even here in Boston, we are informed, pride and prejudice have got to such a pitch, that in the very houses erected to the Lord they have built little places for the reception of colored people, where they must sit during meeting, or keep away from the house of God. Hypocrisy could hardly go further than that of preachers who could not see the evils at their door but could send out missionaries to convert the heathen, notwithstanding.

When Thurgood Marshall went to a Southern town to try a case, he didn't know whether he would be alive at the end of the day.

When I was a child, it was segregated, and I couldn't go across a fence to certain parts of Gainesville.

Separate but equal is a fraud.

Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit...

I want to yell so loud that Baby Girl can hear me that dirty ain't a color, disease ain't the Negro side a town. I want to stop that moment from coming - and it come in ever white child's life - when they start to think that colored folks ain't as good as whites. ... I pray that wasn't her moment, Pray I still got time.

In America, there is no racial segregation. I'm not sure I'm quite familiar with this phrase.