James E. Rogers Quotes

Good education, housing and jobs are imperatives for the Negroes, and I shall support them in their fight to win these objectives, but I shall tell the Negroes that while these are necessary, they cannot solve the main Negro problem.

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.

When I look at 55 percent of our black men dropping out of school, how bad off are we going to be when we need some lawyers?

Slavery is but half abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions of freeman with votes in their hands are left without education.

Never before has a supposedly free country denied basic liberty to so many of its citizens. In December 2006, some 2.25 million persons were being held in the nearly 5,000 prisons and jails that are scattered across America’s urban and rural landscapes…. On average, state inmates have fewer than 11 years of schooling. They are also vastly disproportionately black and brown.

I did more for the Russian serf in giving him land as well as personal liberty, than America did for the Negro slave set free by the proclamation of President Lincoln. How could you Americans have been so blind as to leave the Negro slave without the tools to work out his own salvation ….Without property of any kind he cannot education himself or his children.

The Negro family, battered and harassed by discrimination, injustice, and uprooting, is in the deepest trouble. While many young Negroes are moving ahead to unprecedented levels of achievement, many more are falling further and further behind.

No, we are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

The Democratic party is one that I've always observed. I have struggled greatly in life from the day I was born, and I am honored to be a part of something that focuses on working class citizens and molds them into a proud specimen.

These are tough times and under this Tory-led government many people in Manchester are suffering and getting left behind. If elected I will use all my energy, skills, experience and knowledge to stand up for our communities and get things done for the better.

Unless young blacks are brought into the mainstream of economic life, they will continue to be on the curbstone.

I hate to say this about the Republican establishment, but their view of Civil Rights is to tip the black waiter five bucks at the country club.

The Negro today perhaps has more political power than ever before and he is worse off than ever before. It is not votes but dollars that count in this civilization.

It was because there was no platform upon which they could stand ... no method by which the communities could translate their desires for those individuals into provision for those individuals.

No man can give anybody his freedom. A man is born free. You may enslave a man after he is born free, and that is in fact what this country does. It enslaves black people after they’re born, so that the only acts that white people can do is to stop denying black people their freedom; that is, they must stop denying freedom. They never give it to anyone.

For too long, I think the African-American community has been taken for granted by one party and completely ignored by the other. It is not acceptable. It's not good for the parties, for the country, or for the community.

One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won't succeed.

We need to intentionally invest in health, in home ownership, in entrepreneurship, in access to democracy, in economic empowerment. If we don't do these things, we shouldn't be surprised that racial inequality persists because inequalities compound.

I just heard that some lead was coming into Newark into schools, and I asked the question, "Whose schools?" They said, "The Black and the Brown." Is that an accident? I don't think so. We are being designed to be destroyed - and unless we see that, and come together as a people under vicious attack we will suffer the consequences of evil that's in high places.

We would never throw up our hands and say to those white boys - well, too bad, if you had just stayed away from marijuana or not dealt dope to your friends when you were 18 you wouldn't be serving a life sentence in prison right now. You wouldn't be locked out of jobs, unable to even get work at McDonalds. No, instead we'd say, "What's wrong with us as a nation that we would condemn so many of our young men to a life of poverty, exclusion, and scorn simply because they made a few mistakes in their youth?".

Unfortunately, race still determines too much, often determines where people live, determines what kind of education in their public schools they can get, and, yes, it determines how they're treated in the criminal justice system.

I believe in white supremacy until the blacks are educated to the point of responsibility. I don't believe in giving authority and positions of leadership and judgment to irresponsible people.

I was a black boy at the height of the crack era, which meant that my instructors pitched education as the border between those who would prosper in America, and those who would be fed to the great hydra of prison, teenage pregnancy and murder.

African-Americans now 45 percent poverty in the inner cities. The education is a disaster. Jobs are essentially nonexistent.

The African-American community, the community within the inner cities has been so badly treated.