David Oyelowo Quotes

Look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin.

These Negroes who go for integration and intermarriage are linking up with the very people who lynched their fathers, raped their mothers, and put their kid sisters in the kitchen to scrub floors.

Protesting the color of a man's skin is not a worthy protest.

I think viewing people by the color of their skin is one of the dumbest ways to view people.

I'm against an all-white anything or an all-black anything.

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.

It always has been, and always will be the position of The Independent that the white folks will prepare Jim Crow accommodations for Negroes just so long as the race produces a Jim Crow leadership. Men would not make cotton, corn and other commodities to sell if there was no market for them; and in like manner, the white man would not offer the Negro second class or Jim Crow accommodations if the Negro would not accept them; and the Negro may expect to be Jim Crowed, buzzard-roosted, discriminated against, kicked about, kicked off the street cars and hauled on elevators with trash and garbage, boxes and plunder, so long as he submits to such conditions and grins at the white man with his hat in his hand. The Independent is informed that Billy Sunday will preach to the Jim Crow Negroes of Atlanta in the Jim Crow meeting provided for Negroes only in his tabernacle Monday night. Now, the gospel of Jesus Christ knows no color line. It is as susceptible to the black man as the white man. Jesus died for all; not for the white folk or for the black folk, but for every man who would seek him diligently in spirit and truth; and, if Billy Sunday can’t preach to Negroes and white folks under the same tent, at the same time, then he ought not to preach to either

Our clear goal must be the advancement of the white race and separation of the white and black races.

Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized: FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.

No Negro, mulatto, or Indian shall from and after the publication of this act bear any office ecclesiastical, civil or military, or be in any place of public trust or power, within this her majesty's colony and dominion of Virginia

I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.

I got pictures of us and they would draw big red rings around us and tell what they thought of us. I got a letter said, "I have been shot three times throught the heart. I hope I see your second act." But this white man who wants to stay white, and to think for the Negro, he is not only destroying the Negro, he is destroying himself, because a house divided against itself cannot stand and that same thing applies to America.

I very much dislike the word "race," and I never use it. I use the word "racist." Race is not a fact. There is only one race: human. Skin color is less than 2 percent of the DNA.

As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.

I think everyone should understand history of segregation the same way we had to go to school and read about George Washington. I believe this generation should know their history and they should know that the struggle's not over yet. For instance, you can't get the cover of a magazine if your skin is too dark.

We believe as much in the purity of race as we think they do... We believe also that the white race of South Africa should be the predominating race.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice.

I remember when I was a kid being called names, including the 'n' word. The first time that happened, it really bothered me. But most of the people I dealt with were all white. Most of my close friends were white.

racism is alive and doing too well in America.

Negrophobes exist. It is not hatred of the Negro, however, that motivates them; they lack the courage for that, or they have lost it. Hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes. Hate demands existence and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behavior; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching. Each to his own side of the street.

Racism is a global problem and it is as damaging to Whites as it is to non-Whites. Everyone must fight against it.

If blacks were given the right to vote, that would place every splay-footed, bandy-shanked, hump-backed, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, woolly-headed, ebon-colored in the country upon an equality with the poor white man.

One hundred years ago, the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the Negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin.

They don't let many black people in the governor's mansion in Alabama, unless they're cleaning.