Ed Kowalczyk Quotes

Segregation by race has declined gradually since 1970, but separation by income has grown steadily in the same period.

We are still a nation deeply divided by race and class.

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

Poverty and the rule of race that is called apartheid drive the Transkeian migrant from security on the land to work in the cities, and then back again.

In a city like New York, you're aware of the rich and poor.

Colour is not the issue in America; class is.

Although black and white Americans live, work, and learn together now, there is still injustice in America.

Black people have always been used as a buffer in this country between powers to prevent class war.

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.

Disenfranchisement is the deliberate theft and robbery of the only protection of poor against rich and black against white.

We cannot go on, as we have gone on for more than half a century, with one great section of our population … set off from the real contribution to solving national issues because of a division of race lines …

This county was formed for the white man, not for the black man.

Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality.

When we finally got school buses for African American students in Georgia, the state legislature ordained that the front bumpers be painted black. Not even the school busses could be equal.

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.

I used to be obsessed with race. I'm more obsessed with class now.

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

Goddamnit, look! We live here and they live there. We black and they white. They got things and we ain't. They do things and we can't. It's just like livin' in jail.

The crisis in America that we barely notice anymore is that we've become two nations - divided by poverty, opportunity, and race. It's like a neighbor's car alarm that we don't hear anymore because it rings so often.

When you have an economically unequal society, you end up with huge swaths of society that are disposable, basically.

Society was cut in two: those who had nothing united in common envy; those who had anything united in common terror.

I was born in New Orleans, and I wasn't allowed to go to the movies.

We can't have it so there are skyscrapers side by side with slums.

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.

In Paris, where I live, the inner neighborhoods are only available to the white elite. The poor and dispossessed are shuffled out to suburbs and never seen.