Mathew Knowles Quotes

I grew up in an all-white community.

Hypersegregated inner-city schools - in which one finds no more than five or ten white children, at the very most, within a student population of as many as 3,000 - are the norm, not the exception, in most northern urban areas today.

I wrote the first book, and I thought people would say: 'Separate and unequal schools in the City of Boston? I didn't know that. Let's go out and fix it.'

In fact, the Harvard study data indicates that 70 percent of African American children attend schools that are predominately African American, about the same level as in 1968 when Dr. King died.

I taught for 17 years in an inner city comprehensive schools.

I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever.

I didn't grow up around all white people; I never wanted to gentrify hip-hop, I've never wanted to speak to an all-white audience.

It is a commonplace by now to say that the urban school systems of America contain a higher percentage of Negro children each year.

At present, black children are more segregated in their public schools than at any time since 1968. In the inner-city schools I visit, minority children typically represent 95 percent to 99 percent of class enrollment.

We cannot ignore the disparity in resources that continue to plague many of our school systems, especially those serving predominantly inner-city minority and impoverished children.

When I first came to Los Angeles, I was a teacher in Compton. I know how in need schools are around the country.

The sheltering of upper income children in private schools not only accelerates the deterioration of public education, it hides its consequences from precisely those people who could do something about it.

Federal, state and municipal policies have isolated many children, especially in urban districts, into schools that are segregated by race, class and income.

I did grow up in a very small town, and I only had a couple of people in my year at school. There were a lot of kids to play with - maybe not the same age, but there was always someone around.

We have a locale-based education system; we have increasing economic segregation. We clearly need a larger federal program to try to help disadvantaged districts.

My father was born in the year 1900 in South Carolina, and he grew up at a time where being an African-American child in the American South was to be deprived of access to anything close to a reasonable education. He only had three years of formal education, but he was self-taught. He read two newspapers a day.

In all my days of schooling, from preschool all the way up to 12th grade, there was not one white person in my class. Literally zero.

You can't just put a bubble over the Westside of L.A. and pretend like there aren't other problems. The way that we are failing the kids in this city through our education system has a profound effect on everybody in the city, and I'm not prepared just to turn a blind eye to that.

People don't believe this, but until sixth grade I'd never seen a white person who wasn't with the police or on TV.

Mum was on benefits for a few years. Then I failed the 11-plus and I went to the secondary modern. And that was hard because the expectations were so low in the school.

I know black kids who don't even know any other black kids except their cousins. And that's enough. You wouldn't look at these kids and say that they are Uncle Toms or self-hating or fleeing or trying to be white, given the culture in which they live, which is very natural to them as kids.

In New York City, the idea that district schools advance equality is a myth.

The world has white people and black people in it. Even in Harlem.

You cannot be responsible for Jim Crow. You can not be responsible for racism. This is much more a problem for the person exercising racism.You are confronted with the reality of racism when you go in the streets, when the eyes of others come upon you. [James] Baldwin goes back with you to all the experiences you went through and gives a name to them, and explains why it is like this.

The essence of White Supremacy is this: they are people who want to keep things as they are. That their children's children's children might be a different color is something very alarming to them - in short they are committed to the maintenance of the static image.