Lori Lightfoot Quotes

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

The U. S, Social Security Act not only takes the Afro-American for a ride, but aids immediately in perpetuating his inferior status, What we see here, as in most other 'liberal' legislation, in a further stratifying of the Negro at the bottom of the ladder of life. .

North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.

For black Americans, we know that gun control... sprouts from racist soil - be it after the or during the infamous Dred Scott case where black man's humanity was not recognized.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.

At the same, we need to remain sensitive to the reality that we are still an African society in which the majority of the people and communities live under severe deprivations and afflictions that are no fault of theirs.

I grew up on what everybody called a plantation - but believe me, it wasn't a plantation. It was just an old farm. I grew up with a lot of black people working in the fields, and it was during the Depression between 1930 and the war, so we were all poor - black and white.

And we never got the mule, let alone the forty acres.

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.

After World War II Black American veterans discovered that German prisoners of war could become citizens and enjoy more democracy in America than they could.

Why can a Communist eat at a lunch counter in Selma, Alabama while a Black American veteran cannot?

In the Pentagon there is a surplus of bathrooms. Why? Because in the 1950s, there were separate bathrooms for white and colored people … in the Pentagon.

Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights were turning the Constitution into a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.

For black people the war [WWII] provided an opportunity to accelerate their demands for equality…. Black Americans highlighted the distance between this ideal of America and the reality of ongoing racial inequality, often through the black press and civil rights organizations

White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White society created it; white institutions maintain it; and white society condones it.

I never rode a bus because I knew I would have to sit in the back.

I have been refused entrance on the buses because I would not pay my fare at the front and go around to the rear door to enter. That was the custom if the bus was crowded up to the point where the white passengers would start occupying.

Time begins the healing process of wounds cut deeply by oppression. We soothe ourselves with the salve of attempted indifference, accepting the false pattern set up by the horrible restriction of Jim Crow laws.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

Whenever you go through the length and breadth of our country... you see a long face: you will see the long face of an African woman because she's black, because she's poor.

I wanted to remind myself and others of the old Jim Crow, so that we can remind ourselves that we're still living in the new Jim Crow. I feel it's important to dress in the fashion of the times.

I was born in a ghetto on the North Side of Pittsburgh. I was born as Emmett Till was dying and the civil rights era was being born.

I grew up poor, black, and working class.