Willie Wells Quotes

In my time, I experienced a black man not being able to be the quarterback of a football team.

I got kicked out of four high schools just because people took issue with the colour of my skin. As if I could help the colour I was born.

I feel sorry for Obama because he's still got to fight the innate racism of Americans. I mean, did you see his first speech, when he got made President and they put all that bullet proof glass in front of him? I think that shows you how racist America still is. Just because he's black doesn't mean he's going to shoot anybody.

The prejudice was so bad in the United States at that time that a dark person with a white person would not be served in a restaurant. My father, mother, and I would try it occasionally. We would sit there, and the food would never come.

So the mayor of New Orleans would have used his own buses had the people had been white?

I also know that while I am black I am a human being, and therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people didn't know that. Every time I tried to go into a place they stopped me.

Racial discrimination does not always violate public policy.

There will always be that dreadful monster prejudice to do extra battle against because of their color.

Negroes are not qualified to be integrated within his command. When I find them qualified, they will be integrated.

Because of unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, [freed slaves] never could amalgamate with the free whites of this country.

The American economy, the American society, the American unconscious are all racist.

The Southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the Reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination

When we finally got school buses for African American students in Georgia, the state legislature ordained that the front bumpers be painted black. Not even the school busses could be equal.

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.

Some white people are privileged, some aren't. Some black people are, some aren't. It's strikes me as, by definition, a racist attack in that it's making a generalization - a negative one - based on skin color.

We need to have a conversation about the fact that black faces are not as visible as they should be, that there is huge inequality everywhere in terms of race.

I don't think any of us that are white can ever fully understand what it's like to be a black person in America today.

Far too often, I have been accepted or rejected for work because of the color of my skin.

I think the sad fact is, there's a long history in this country at looking at African-American as subhuman. And I think that's reflected in the fact that, when we have problems that really are problems of employment, that are really problems of mental health, that are really problems of drugs, our answer is the police.

racism is alive and doing too well in America.

America that is divided against itself cannot stand, and we cannot say we have all of this unity they say we have when black people are being discriminated against in every city in America I have visited.

When people like me, they like me "in spite of my color." When they dislike me; they point out that it isn't because of my color. Either way, I am locked in to the infernal circle.

I would think black people think everything is about race. They are the ones who are on the outside of the game. They are the ones who face it every day.

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

Up until then I'd thought that white people and colored people getting along was the big aim, but after that I decided everybody being colorless together was a better plan. I thought of that policeman, Eddie Hazelwurst, saying I'd lowered myself to be in this house of colored women, and for the very life of me I couldn't understand how it had turned out this way, how colored women had become the lowest ones on the totem pole. You only had to look at them to see how special they were, like hidden royalty among us. Eddie Hazelwurst. What a shitbucket.