Bryant Gumbel Quotes

When you cut facilities, slash jobs, abuse power, discriminate, drive people into deeper poverty & shoot people dead whilst refusing to provide answers or justice, the people will rise up & express their anger & frustration if you refuse to hear their cries. A riot is the language of the unheard.

I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.

Class certainly loomed large in Katrina's aftermath. Blacks of means escaped the tragedy; blacks without them suffered and died. In reality, it is how race and class interact that made the situation for the poor so horrible on the Gulf Coast. The rigid caste system that punishes poor blacks and other minorities also targets poor whites.

Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.

I'M ANGRY because the stories of injustice that have been passed down for generations seem to be continuing before our very eyes.

Racial inequality has gotten worse in the last years because any time you have a moribund economy, the people who historically have had more problems getting jobs have suffered. And that, I think, is triggering a lot of the animosity.

There clearly is a serious race problem in the country. Just take a look at what's happening to African American communities. For example wealth, wealth in African American communities is almost zero. The history is striking.

I remember being infuriated from the top of my head to the tip of my toes the first time a screen was put around Bob Carter and me on a train leaving Washington in the 1940s.

Anger is wonderful. It keeps you going. I'm angry about bankers. About the government.

We blacks were the first people embracing Obama, long before the people at expensive fundraisers were supporting him. We gave him his first love, 96 percent of blacks voted for him in 2008. Yet today we are the number one in unemployment, with 16 percent of American blacks out of work.

And we never got the mule, let alone the forty acres.

I think it has other roots, has to do, in part, with a general anxiety in contemporary life... nuclear bombs, inequality of possibility and chance, inequality of goods allotted to us, a kind of general racist, unjust attitude that is pervasive.

To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.

The great companies did not know that the line between hunger and anger is a thin line.

Opportunity seems to be color-coded here in America

The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War II for no really good reason by our most liberal President. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slavelike inequalities.

I am not satisfied as long as the Negro sees life as a long and empty corridor with a "No Exit" sign at the end. The cup of endurance has run over.

The kind of hope I grew up with is missing in today's ghetto youth because of a breakdown in family life. It has its roots in slavery when often the father of the family was uprooted and sold down the river. The son would grow up and get married and, when he was unable to get a job because there were not jobs for a black man, he would get embarrassed that he could not support his family and walk out thinking, "my mother did it alone and my wife is no better." Well, that went on generation after generation, and it's no better today. There still are no jobs and welfare encourages the man to leave the family. One of the greatest problems facing the country is how to reconcile the young ghetto dweller with the rest of America. We have a large problem of ignorance, lack of opportunity, and divided families. I worry about how we are going to solve it. It's not just trying to persuade people to be nice and understanding. I've been as angry as anyone else. But most people define the end of anger as when you become well-off. I think as we resolve the breakdown of the black family, caused by slavery and continued by welfare, the problem will come closer to its solution

I was angry with the Church because they were not aggressively pointing out the immorality of racism.

What's going to be a hundred years from now ain't much account to us.... The whites has the lands and the sense, an' the blacks has nothin' but their freedom, an' it's jest like a dream to them.

It has been the purpose of the ruling class, apparently, to build new barriers between themselves and the common people, rather than tear away any of those already existing. I think no one can understand the actual condition of the mass of whites in Georgia and the Carolinas, except by some daily contact with them. The injustice done to three fourths of them was hardly less than that done to all the blacks.... Nine of every ten white men in South Carolina had almost as little to do with even State affairs as the negroes had.

For years now I have heard the word “Wait”. It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never”.

White society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White society created it; white institutions maintain it; and white society condones it.

Negro poverty is not white poverty. Many of its causes and many of its cures are the same. But there are differences—deep, corrosive, obstinate differences—radiating painful roots into the community and into the family, and the nature of the individual. These differences are not racial differences. They are solely and simply the consequence of ancient brutality, past injustice, and present prejudice.