Dick Gephardt Quotes

I have consistently opposed forced bussing to achieve integration.

The NAACP was even considering earlier this summer reassessing their position on school integration.

During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed.

I am opposed to busing for the purpose of achieving racial balance in our schools.

Busing has only achieved white flight.

In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.

I couldn't go to school with whites. Now there are schools that educate everyone.

I was bused to a school in Gerritsen Beach in Brooklyn in 1972. I was one of the first black kids in the history of the school.

I'm not for integration and I'm not against it.

I think every group of black guys should have at least one white guy in it.

The Supreme Court is having a hard time integrating schools. What chance do I have to integrate audiences?

The abolition of the separate school system in the south raises serious practical problems.... We face the abolition of the public school system. Boldness is essential but wisdom is indispensable.

If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy. God bless you.

The Problem We All Live With

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

The area where I grew up in Birmingham was very diverse - I was aware of my race but not overly aware of it - and there seemed to be an understanding that we were all very much in the same boat.

I grew up in the era of the desegregation program. I actually got bussed to a predominately white high school. I didn't have a choice.

The social science on the impact of desegregation is clear. Researchers have consistently found that students in integrated schools - irrespective of ethnicity, race, or social class - are more likely to make academic gains in mathematics, reading, and often science than they are in segregated ones.

Once my school was integrated, and I was there with white kids and a few black kids, it really didn't matter to us what we looked like.

I have black friends, but I don't just hang out with black kids. I might pull up with Indian kids, white kids, black kids, whatever.

It took the United States Army to get one Negro into the University of Mississippi; it took troops to get a few Negroes in the white schools at Little Rock and another dozen places in the South.

Wherever schools can be integrated through the busing method, and where it won't be just a, a terrible inconvenience, I think it ought to be done.

When you've got a society that is diverse, what happens is for a time, the issue is integrating your minorities into that society.

School integration did not come to be the day after the Brown ruling was issued. Progress took years, and it took passion, strength, and courage from a large group of committed individuals.

My love of South Africa is not gray; it's not vague. It's very specific. It's in keeping with our Constitution - 'Unity in diversity.'