Joe Frazier Quotes

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.

Although the race problem may seem to lie dormant at times, it continually exists, lives on and on and sometimes rages with all the fury of a jungle beast. It gnaws at the very vitals of our existence, in time it will sap our strength and destroy the greatness of our American way of life unless solved properly and permanently.

If you seat these black buggers, the whole South will walk out.

I grew up in the once segregated South. I experienced forced integration during my formative school years. I lived the sacrifices, burdens, and tears. I also lived the moments of understanding, of acknowledgment, of fellowship and success. I saw my parents and grandparents coming home beaten down - and some of my friends beaten up.

On any given day, there's always something I'd rather be doing than facing the ugly, racist underbelly of America.

When a black church is hit in South Carolina by someone with hate in their spirit, that's something that touches all of America, but as a person of color, I see that story even through a deeper prism of, 'Gosh, that takes us back to a time when black churches were targets in this country.'

The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling because when I was a little girl I remember the horror of the East St. Louis race riot.

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

There's a lot of racism still alive and still active.

You know, bigotry isn't relevant to just the South. It never was. But I'm very grateful that I don't know what it's like from experience.

I remember being infuriated from the top of my head to the tip of my toes the first time a screen was put around Bob Carter and me on a train leaving Washington in the 1940s.

To the great majority of white Americans, the Negro problem has distinctly negative connotations. It suggests something difficult to settle and equally difficult to leave alone. It is embarrassing. It makes for moral uneasiness.

What is our greatest enemy? Segregation.

Arizona has always been anti-black.

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, in a time and place where no one was saying, 'Look how far we've come,' because we hadn't come very far, to say the least. Although Jackson's population was half white and half black, I didn't have a single black friend or a black neighbor or even a black person in my school.

As an African-American, I know all too well the negative thoughts and feelings hatred and bigotry cause.

The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling... How can you expect the world to believe in you and respect your preaching of democracy when you yourself treat your colored brothers as you do?

There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.

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.

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

The problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color-line.

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.