Don Cornelius Quotes

To the great majority of white Americans, the Negro problem has distinctly negative connotations. It suggests something difficult to settle and equally difficult to leave alone. It is embarrassing. It makes for moral uneasiness.

I grew up in the segregated South, right here in Lynchburg, Virginia.

I went to an all white school where I dealt with racism.

I find that the prejudice in this country to color is very great, and I sometimes fear that it is on the increase.

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.

The misperception about the South is that everybody is racist, and all black people are victims, that what was prevalent in the '60s is only relegated to the South.

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.

I found there's a fairly blatant racism in America that's already there, and I don't think I noticed it when I lived here as a kid. But when I went back to South Africa, and then it's sort of thrust in your face, and then came back here - I just see it everywhere.

This nation is being divided into black and white, and the present system encourages this.

If acknowledging that racial misgivings and misunderstandings are still a part of politics and life in America, I plead guilty.

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.

But it is a black man's game, and it will be forever.

Arizona has always been anti-black.

Many of the racial problems in America are caused by the fact that people are innately tribal, and politicians know how to exploit that biological fact.

When Thurgood Marshall became a lawyer, race relations in the United States were particularly bad.

Racism may be as systemic as it always was. It is the great problem of America. It's the one stumbling block that I don't believe was ever smoothed over.

I grew up segregated, but there was not much feeling of being shut out of anything.

My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination, they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble, not to make any noise.

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, in a time and place where no one was saying, 'Look how far we've come,' because we hadn't come very far, to say the least. Although Jackson's population was half white and half black, I didn't have a single black friend or a black neighbor or even a black person in my school.

I know my destiny. I was born into animosity, bigotry and hatred. We had water for white folks, and water for coloured folks. White lines, black lines. I came from Beaufort in South Carolina, and it was tougher than Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

For generations, even many otherwise decent white Southerners learned to despise black people.

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

Sure, I've felt racism. I think everybody has prejudice. When I was growing up, the dark Mexican kids weren't allowed in the public swimming pool in Dallas. My light-skinned friend got in, and he laughed at us. It didn't seem like a big deal, because we didn't know any different. So I never ran into anything that actually scarred me.

For me, personally, life in South Africa had come to an end. I had been lucky in some of the whites I had met. Meeting them had made a straight 'all-blacks-are-good, all-whites-are-bad' attitude impossible. But I had reached a point where the gestures of even my friends among the whites were suspect, so I had to go or be forever lost.

The NAACP believes the Tea Party is racist. The Tea Party believes the NAACP is racist.