Rosa Parks Quotes

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 have the hatred of apartheid in my bones.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

As you grow older, you'll see white men cheat black men every day of your life, but let me tell you something and don't you forget it - whenever a white man does that to a black man, no matter who he is, how rich he is, or how fine a family he comes from, he is trash.

I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

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.

We've begun to put fear into those whites who think they can do anything they want to a black person and get away with it.

My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination, they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble, not to make any noise.

My father’s contemporaries, the white ones…had made laws that he must carry a reference book. They also made a law that an Alsatian dog must have a certain ticket on his neck (a dog license) and he must also carry a ‘reference book’. That Alsatian dog was going to die without ever deciding a law that governs his life. So was my father…The discomfort of prison cells is better than the emptiness of walking in the streets as if you were free when you are a dog in the land of your birth.

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.

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

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.

Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes

I talked and talked of everything I know about the white man's inhuman treatment of the Negro.

I'm not a docile, complacent person when it comes to racial aggressions.

When I first went to jail in 1960 with seven classmates trying to use their public library against the backdrop of my father being a veteran of World War II, not being able to use - having to sit behind Nazi on American military bases, I lost my fear of jails and death.

I waited at the counter of a white restaurant for eleven years. When they finally integrated, they didn't have what I wanted.

The hate and scorn showered on us Negro officers by our fellow Americans convinced me that there was no sense in my dying for a world ruled by them. I made up my mind that if I got through this war I would study law and use my time fighting for men who could not strike back.

Go to the depot here, now, and what will you see? A well-dressed colored lady, with her little children by her side, whom she has brought up intelligently and with refinement, as much so as white children, comes to the cars, and where is she shown to? Into the smoking car, where men are cursing, swearing, spitting on the floor.

Racial discrimination, South Africa's economic power, its oppression and exploitation of all the black peoples, are part and parcel of the same thing.

I also know that while I am black I am a human being, and therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people didn't know that. Every time I tried to go into a place they stopped me.

The kids growing up in the apartheid era were so restricted and angry - if they spoke out against it, they were thrown in jail.

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

For a black student to work in southwest Mississippi for example - or in the Delta in 1960, 1961, 1962 - was high-risk work.

On the horizon loom a growing number of iconoclasts and Atheists, young black men and women who can read think and ask questions; and who impertinently demand to know why Negroes should revere a god that permits them to be lynched, Jim-Crowed, and disenfranchised.