David Draiman Quotes

Black people have been qualified to be president for hundreds of years. George Washington Carver could have been president. I could go on with a list of black men that were qualified to be the president of the United States. So the Obama victory is progress for white people.

The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire.

The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the blacks will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness.

Because of where I come from, I never thought I'd see in my life a black candidate running for President.

The very fact that Barack Obama - an African-American - was twice elected to the presidency will always be the lead line in that hard-to-meld, gold-plated paragraph.

In my wildest dreams, I never would have thought we'd come to the point where were talking about the re-election of a black president.

Electing a black president was probably the only coup America could pull off.

Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.

Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

The fact is that racism, despite all the doomsayers, has diminished.

Obama was elected in a flourish of promise that many in the African-American community believed would help not only to symbolize African-American progress since the Civil War and Civil Rights Acts but that his presidency would result in doors opening in the halls of power as had never been seen before by black America.

What really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro ‘first’ will become the first Negro president. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.

Obama is the first African-American president, and for some people, that means a great deal, and for some people, it means very little.

Electing the first African-American president was a tremendous accomplishment, but it hasn't erased racism.

Anything with the title 'Breaking The Barriers' means a lot to us, and to myself in particular, because if it wasn't for those who broke the barrier of color before me, I would not have the opportunity to live the life I'm leading right now.

I always believed there would be an African-American president. It was something I'd dreamed about, thought about, but certainly did not believe would happen in my lifetime.

However, while we should certainly celebrate the demise of overt official racism, we must also critically examine where we are at this historical moment, recognize the many challenges ahead and reaffirm our commitment to making Brown v. Board a reality.

The country has come a long way in race relations, but the pendulum swings so far back. Everyone wants to be so sensitive.

Let me tell you the truth: I'm 45 years old. I never thought that I would live to see a black president.

It's not painful to relive it. I'm comfortable with my position in American history.

I grew up in the 1970s, but I don't think a whole lot had changed from the '60s. Oh, it had changed in the law books - but not in the kitchens of white homes.

I feel that there has been progress made since I was a boy on matters of race, but we have a long way to go.

I'm not saying to you that every element of segregation and discrimination and second-class citizenship has changed. But in the political sense, the world has changed. People now who want to vote can vote.

One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.

I have never been more proud of the United States than I am this year. We have elected an African-American president. We have the stellar Michelle Obama setting the standard for American women. I simply cannot say it enough: look how far we've come.