Forest Whitaker Quotes

There are still some black youth growing up in ghettoes in this country who will never know a white person—not even speak to one.

Segregation not only separated the races in the South but it separated the South from the rest of the nation.

When I came here, there were two groups of United Church Women, one black and one white.

All my playmates on the farm were black, and later, when I started school in Plains, it was all white. But I was always eager to get back home to my friends in Archery.

I was born in New Orleans, and I wasn't allowed to go to the movies.

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

I had to jump on the tractor and do my chores. I would have just killed to be in town, to be able to Rollerblade hand-in-hand with somebody I had a crush on. I just wanted to get off the farm, to find my outlet.

Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.

I think there's an element where people get very comfortable in their ghetto. Which is fair enough.

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.

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

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.

Most Australians live in the cities on the east coast, where contact between black and white occurred as much as 200 years earlier than on the west coast - and where 95 percent of Australians are able to live 95 percent of their lives without ever seeing an Aboriginal face.

Dallas was a Black and White society at that time; it didn't have the diversity it has now.

My mother was from Mississippi, or is from 'Mississippi;' my father was from Alabama. He speaks about conditions in Mississippi and Alabama. They were really the poster children for the bad public laws that segregated, according to race, in our country.

Segregation of the races is proper and the only practical and correct way of life ...

We insist that educationally and socially we maintain a segregated society …

We cannot go on, as we have gone on for more than half a century, with one great section of our population … set off from the real contribution to solving national issues because of a division of race lines …

The children of the white families in town were not permitted to associate with me, because my father was committing the then unpardonable crime, in Southern eyes, of educating negroes.

Our nation is moving towards two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.

It’s a sordid business this divvying us up by race.

American schools are disturbingly racially segregated--period.

It shall be unlawful for any person, corporation, or association of persons to maintain or operate any college, school, or institution where persons of the white and negro races are both received as pupils for instruction.

I never thought, when I was a kid, that there was a sense of competition or animosity towards poor blacks. I just thought there was a recognition that they lived differently - they primarily lived on the other side of town. And we're both poor, but that's kind of it. There wasn't much explicit statement of kinship or of the lack of kinship.

The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South.