Michelle Alexander Quotes

Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is and what he has done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States and the world. He walks us on a tightrope from birth.

We definitely experience racism in England and different levels of oppression as well. Anywhere affected by colonialism there's certain kinds of race relations and class relations going on.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.

Racial discrimination, South Africa's economic power, its oppression and exploitation of all the black peoples, are part and parcel of the same thing.

I will never regret not denouncing apartheid.

Being a white South African, I enjoyed the better things that that country gave to a small percentage of its population.

There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

Every institution where a number of the coloured races are, or can be drawn together, shall be broken up… If we destroy, or prevent the building of the nest, we shall not be liable to the incursions of the brood.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

The Negro people, most exploited of the toilers, suffering from lynching and Jim Crowism, robbed of their constitutional rights, are being prepared to fight another war for 'democracy' in order to further enslave them.

You spend your whole lifetime in your occupation, actually making life clever, easy and convenient for white people. But when you have to get transportation home, you are denied an equal accommodation. Our existence was for the white man's comfort and well-being; we had to accept being deprived of just being human.

In the South, there is more overt racism. It's more willfully ignorant and brazen. But it's not as if by moving I'm going to be able to escape institutionalized racism. It's not as though my life won't be twisted and impacted by racism anymore. It will.

I grew up in a segregated community: I couldn't go to the public schools, beaches, certain parts of town.

The tobacco markets I worked in were segregated. If you went to the bathroom, there was 'White,' there was 'Colored,' and there was 'Other.' I grew up in that.

Whether it's microaggressions or blatant racism, it's always been a fight. We've been fighting oppression for 400 years and it will continue to be a fight.

I do believe that something akin to a racial caste system is alive and well in America.

It is wrong to divide the nation white against black, native born against immigrant or one religion against another. It is also wrong to divide people by income. East Germany was not an improvement over South Africa. Obama divides Americans against each other. This is wrong.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.

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.

I wanted to make a black story about South Africa. Unfortunately, no producer in the United States would put one penny into a black story.

I lived in a country where I couldn't live where I wanted to live. I lived in a country where I couldn't go where I wanted to eat. I lived in a country where I couldn't get a job, except for those put aside for people of my colour or caste.

The organizers and perpetuators of segregation are as much the enemy of America as any foreign invader.