Mary McLeod Bethune Quotes

Any white person who shall assemble with slaves, or free negroes ... for the purpose of instructing them to read or write, ...shall be punished by confinement in the jail ... and by fine. .

It shall be unlawful for any person, corporation, or association of persons to maintain or operate any college, school, or institution where persons of the white and negro races are both received as pupils for instruction.

Educating Negroes is pointless and dangerous. The state should ensure that tax dollars from white citizens should only go to white schools.

For a person who grew up in the '30s and '40s in the segregated South, with so many doors closed without explanation to me, libraries and books said, 'Here I am, read me.' Over time I have learned I am at my best around books.

Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept.

I have always observed that wherever you find the negro, everything is going down around him, and wherever you find the white man, you see everything around him improving.

In the segregated South, education was almost like armor. It was a way to put yourself in a category where even with the slings and arrows and humiliations of racism and segregation, somehow you had better control of the situation. I always said my parents understood that you might not be able to control your circumstances, but they and their parents believed that you could control your reaction to your circumstances.

I cannot face my God much longer knowing that his black creatures are held separate and distinct from his white creatures in the game that has given me all that I can call my own.

There is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of Americans. Their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to people of white skin.... The more I feel like an American, the more the situation pains me.

A good many observers have remarked that if equality could come at once, the Negro would not be ready for it. I submit that the white American is even more unprepared.

There is a natural disgust in the minds of nearly all white people to the idea of indiscriminate amalgamation of the white and black races... A separation of the races is the only perfect preventive of amalgamation, but as an immediate separation is impossible, the next best thing is to keep them apart where they are not already together. If white and black people never get together in Kansas, they will never mix blood in Kansas...

Blessings be the inventor of the alphabet, pen and printing press! Life would be -- to me in all events -- a terrible thing without books.

I don't sign for white people.

Not a state within a state, but the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is, is saying that the black man, since the white man, has found it impossible to bring about integration, other than toke on a ta - other than on a token basis, and which proves that the, the two of us, the ex-slave and the master, can't live in the same house as equals.

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.

Hungry man, reach for the book: it is a weapon.

The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor - all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.

Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy - which many believe goes hand in hand with it - will be dead as well.

One of the points in which I was especially interested was the Jim Crow regulations, that is, the system of separation of the races in street cars and railroad trains.

Everything I worry about would be better if more people could read, write and comprehend.

Reading is a basic tool in the living of a good life.

The ability to write and read books is one of the things that transformed us as a species.

Reading is power. Reading is life.

Also, of course, for most of this time most Americans thought of America as a white country with, at best, only a very segregated and subordinate role for blacks.

Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.