Janis Ian Quotes

Dallas was a Black and White society at that time; it didn't have the diversity it has now.

I flatly deny that it is a civil right for a white man to marry a black woman or for a black man to marry a white woman.

I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

The prejudice was so bad in the United States at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit there, and the food would never come.

Black people lived right by the railroad tracks, and the train would shake their houses at night. I would hear it as a boy, and I thought: I'm gonna make a song that sounds like that.

The social issues outside of football are not as defined as they were earlier, when integration took place and certain rights were legislated. The Civil Rights movement is over. Individuals can buy homes wherever they want, travel first class wherever they want, eat wherever they want.

I have nothing but the best memories of growing up in New Jersey. Of course, I grew up in a nice town, a suburb. But Tenafly was right next to Englewood, which had a tremendous amount of racial tension in the '60s. So I was aware of the real world.

In those days, man, in the '50s, black people in the South... We didn't recognize contracts that much. And we didn't recognize marriages that much, either.

My mother was a member of the Cape Coloured community. 'Coloured' is the South African word for the half-caste community that was a by-product of the early contact between black and white.

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.

I was inspired to make music since I was 7 because my aunt is a songwriter.

I drank from colored water fountains and from the white water fountain just to see what it was like when I was a kid. What shocks me is that these kids today don't realize that this happened in many of our lifetimes.

When I was ten, I spent a school holiday watching a lot of films: 'Dead Poets Society', 'Stand By Me', 'Home Alone' and 'The Goonies'. It completely inspired me. I told my parents I wanted to become an actor after that.

When I was born here in Gulfport in 1966, my parents' interracial marriage was still illegal, and it was very hard to drive around town with my parents, to be out in public with my parents.

The Army is not out to make any social reforms. The Army will put men of different races in different companies. It will change that policy when the Nation as a whole changes it.

Segregation of the races is proper and the only practical and correct way of life ...

School desegregation cases overturned not only the constitutional precedents built up over three quarters of a century but the social structure of an entire region ... Desegregation decrees have all the qualities of social legislation ...

White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.

I never rode a bus because I knew I would have to sit in the back.

I remember being a teenager, I never thought that I'd live in a society that was not segregated. It happened.

You know what the lowest rated episode we ever had was? Where Captain Kirk kissed Uhuru - a white man kissing an African-American woman. All the stations in the American South - in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana - refused to air it. And so our ratings plummeted.

Our scientists grapple with the difficulties of placing a man on the moon, but the immediately troubling concern of our society is whether men of different races can sit together at a lunch counter.

I've done a lot of research about the Civil Rights movement, and I'm fascinated with how difficult it would have been for a black man to show feelings toward a white woman in that time period.

Even in the '80s and '90s, many white Southerners were still bitter about court decisions that required racial integration of the schools. It wasn't that they were outwardly opposed to white and black people attending school together, it was that the rulings threatened their proud identity as independent Southerners.

Fifty-four years ago, I was an 8-year-old boy living in rural Kentucky when the schools were desegregated. I walked into a white school where I was not wanted nor welcomed.