Abraham Lincoln Quotes

…I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and the black races…nor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry

I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. That I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people.... I as much as any man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.

I am not ... in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor of qualifying them ... to intermarry with white people.

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.

If blacks were given the right to vote, that would place every splay-footed, bandy-shanked, hump-backed, thick-lipped, flat-nosed, woolly-headed, ebon-colored in the country upon an equality with the poor white man.

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...

I'm so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

When I went south in the 1960s, I knew I could die. If I went down there and did what I did up in Chicago and made all of those hatin' white folks laugh, then I would have been defeated.

I prefer the 1950s where people were like, "I'm a white supremacist, and that's who I am." Now people want to burn a cross on your lawn and call themselves not racists.

To change history is very slow. The first two times I came to the States - black people didn't have the right to vote.

The black people of America have been victims of violence at the hands of the white men for four hundred years, and following the ignorant Negro preachers, we have thought that it was godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us.

The prejudice of the race appears stronger in the States that have abolished slaves than in the States where slavery still exists. White carpenters, white bricklayers, and white painters will not work side by side with the blacks in the North but do it in almost every Southern State.

In the South, prior to the Civil Rights movement and the 1964 Civil Rights Act, democracy was the rule. The majority of people were white, and the white majority had little or no respect for any rights which the black minority had relative to property, or even to their own lives. The majority - the mob and occasionally the lynch mob - ruled.

I will go even further ... and will vote for all measures to elevate their condition and to educate them (Negroes) separate and apart from the whites ... but when it comes to placing him upon the same social and political level as my own race, I must refuse to do it.

I have never contended for giving the negro equal privileges with the white man. That is a doctrine I do not advocate.

it shall not be lawful for any freedman, free negro or mulatto to intermarry with any white person; nor for any person to intermarry with any freedman, free negro or mulatto; and any person who shall so intermarry shall be deemed guilty of felony.

There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

The great majority of negroes in the South who do not vote, do not care to vote and would not know for what to vote if they could.

In this perilous world, if a black boy wanted to live a halfway normal life and die a natural death he had to learn early the art of how to get along with white folks.

You Negroes are not willing to admit it yet, but integration will not work. Why, it is against the white man's nature to integrate you into his house.

The white race is doomed not because it's white but because of its misdeeds.

Any time a negro community lives under fear that its churches are going to be bombed, then they have to realize they're living in a war zone.

Here's the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it's all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they're not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.

All peoples are struggling to blast a way through the industrial monopoly of races and nations, but the Negro as a whole has failed to grasp its true significance and seems to delight in filling only that place created for him by the white man.