Michael Dyson Quotes

Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes

My only crime was being born black - or being born black in Alabama.

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.

I'm the son of a Black man who was born in the segregated South.

I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956, with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins - I was only 16 years old - we went down to the public library trying to check out some books, and we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors. It was a public library.

One must learn how to be black in America.

The time to end racial segregation in the South is upon us now.

White southerners used anti communism to beat back the challenges to the status quo on race.

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

Sammy was the only one that looked like me, so I naturally gravitated to him. Sammy made it cool to be black at a time when, let's just say it, it wasn't very cool to be black. His name was on the front of the building in lights, and he had to go in the back. But you never saw him sweat.

Black people have been fighting for basic citizenship rights since the inception of the country.

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. As a grown woman, I saw the first black president reach down a hand and touch the face of a child like I once was, lifting his eyes toward a better future.

I used to say, 'We've always had integration in the South... we just want it now in the daytime.

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 read a lot of W.E.B. Du Bois, who wrote 'The Souls of Black Folk.'

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.

In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

In '42,' it's like the '40s where racial equality had come into the consciousness of a lot of people, whereas in the 1900s it was sort of a new thing.

When I wrote 'The Secret Life of Bees,' I was writing about civil rights.

The African-American experience is one of the most important threads in the American tapestry.

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.

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.

Well, I've been politically involved for a really long time. Growing up in the segregated South, it was a very painful experience for me to live through the open racism of the time.

Even after facing jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. courageously and boldly spoke out against racial inequality.