Jewell Parker Rhodes Quotes

My earliest memories are of the civil rights era. My earliest experiences were rage.

People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same.

Freedom in America was not always flat. Racism made it un-flat, so that some people had privileges over other people.

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.

Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights were turning the Constitution into a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.

For a black male, the sound of the blues is pre-Civil Rights. It's oppression.

The government has a history of not treating people fairly, from the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II to African-Americans in the Civil Rights era.

In the combat between the emerging Negroes of the South and the ruling white trash, I sympathize greatly with the Negro.

Why can a Communist eat at a lunch counter in Selma, Alabama while a Black American veteran cannot?

Please tell the Attorney General that we have been cooling off for 350 years. If we cool off any more, we’ll be in the deep freeze. The Freedom Rides will go on.

We are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North.

Civil Rights is all right for you. You don’t have and Negroes in your district.

Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes

When Thurgood Marshall went to a Southern town to try a case, he didn't know whether he would be alive at the end of the day.

As a child, I lived through and survived the segregated South. I sat at the back of the bus at a time when America wasn't yet as great as it could be.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.

Happily, the days when overt racial discrimination and segregation were championed by social conservatives are long past.

I couldn't see why a black man wasn't allowed to drink out of the same water fountain or sit in the same bus or go to the same schools as a white guy.

When I was a child, it was segregated, and I couldn't go across a fence to certain parts of Gainesville.

Jim Crow laws stripped blacks of basic rights. Despite landmark civil rights laws, many public schools were still segregated, blacks still faced barriers to voting, and violence by white racists continued. Such open racism is mostly gone in America, but covert racism is alive and well.

Racism plagued America throughout the '60s, into the '70s, through the '80s; it continued in the '90s and in the first decade of the new millennium; and it persists today.