William Apess Quotes

If white America is ready to extend complete democratic rights to colored people, there will be no race, no racial tension and no racial prejudice on either side, but we can be sure that any movement 'back to normalcy' in race relations will be bitterly resisted by colored people. It is now up to white America to make its choice...

What whites cannot experience and may never understand is that no matter which side of the bed I chose to wake up on, I would still be a black man in the racially divisive America.

There is an unwillingness on the part of our people for you free colored people to remain with us. Whether it is right or wrong I do not propose to discuss, but to propose it as a fact with which we have to deal. It is better for us both, therefore, to be separated.

In order to get beyond racism, we must first take account of race.... And in order to treat some persons equally, we must treat them differently..

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

I think there is a big difference between expressing the pain and anger that many African Americans and other people of color may feel versus language that I think now crosses the line and goes into hate.

Stated briefly, the problem confronting the colored peoples of the world is how to live in freedom, peace and security without being invaded, subjugated, expropriated, persecuted and humiliated by Caucasians justifying their actions by the myth of racial superiority..

I don't think that the country is ever ready to have the conversation about race.

There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us ... Even when you cease to be slaves, you are far removed from being placed on an equality with the white man ... I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact

Whites don’t like to see the nigger with too much … White people was afraid that money will make the nigger act like his own man.

I am for the negro against the crocodile, but for the white man against the negro.

Any white person who shall assemble with slaves, or free negroes ... for the purpose of instructing them to read or write, ...shall be punished by confinement in the jail ... and by fine. .

If I may seem a bit moved about this, it is because of the hell I have been through because I am a Negro, and I think this committee ought to show a little more consideration for the democracy that Negroes are denied .... the menace that ought to be paid attention to is the menace where 14 or 15 million Negroes have no place to turn to feel that they are protected.

The most formidable of all the ills that threaten the future of the Union arises from the presence of a black population upon its territory; and in contemplating the cause of the present embarrassments, or the future dangers of the United States, the observer is invariably led to this as a primary fact.

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.

The relation between the white and colored people of this country is the great, paramount, imperative, and all-commanding question for this age and nation to solve

What right do white racist, who believe their race is superior, have for complaining about black racists, who see something special in their own race? What right do black racists, who see a special character in their race, have for complaining about white racists?

There are poor people of color in this country whose bodies, locked in cages, enrich the prison-industrial complex.

The supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards, because the white race is the superior race... This declaration shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts

The Southern Negro is not an incurably ignorant ape. The Southern white masses are not biologically degenerate.

... currently Latinos are 63% of all babies born in Los Angeles, White is 17%, Black and Asian combined are 21%. In other words, 84% of all births in Los Angeles, are not white. Hollywood please take note.

Our duty is to fight! Then we can adjust the problems that remain in the life of the colored man.

The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent ... I would preserve for free white labor a fair country ... where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.

Racialized oppression and dehumanization is woven into the very fabric of our nation — the effects of which can be seen in the lawful lynching of black and brown people by the police, and the mass incarceration of black and brown lives in the prison industrial complex,

This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.