Molly Ivins Quotes

Before civil rights struggles hit their towns, white southerners believed that race relations in their town was good…. The thought the agitation the result of outside forces---communism, the NAACP and Northern liberals.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.

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.

Ralph Bunche, who is an internationally recognized and respected diplomat, can't stay in a hotel in Georgia, which means that no matter what the accomplishment, the intellectual, the academic, or professional level of a negro is, collectively he stands condemned.

When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like it.

If you were black, you experienced prejudice. It wasn't a real horrible thing for us; we went through it. We noticed it mostly in the South and in Las Vegas, where we couldn't stay in the hotels where we entertained. But that began to change.

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.

I grew up in Houston, and I remember we had separate drinking fountains, and black people sat in the balcony of the theater... We had an African-American housekeeper growing up who was really like my second mother. I thought it was silly - hatred just because of the color of somebody's skin.

Slavery ended a long time ago, but the institution of chattel slavery and the ideology of racial subordination that accompanied it have cast a long shadow. I speak here of the history of lynching throughout the country; the racially biased policing and judging in the South under Jim Crow and in the cities of the Northeast, Midwest, and West to which blacks migrated after the First and Second World Wars; and the history of racial apartheid that ended only as a matter of law with the civil-rights movement. It should come as no surprise that in the post–civil rights era, race, far from being peripheral, has been central to the evolution of American social policy.

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

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.

Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson understood that the South would continue to be an outcast unless it abandoned folkways that were injurious—to whites as well as blacks—and they employed the powers of the state to coerce recalcitrants into new patterns of behavior.

If you seat these black buggers, the whole South will walk out.

Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes

When Thurgood Marshall went to a Southern town to try a case, he didn't know whether he would be alive at the end of the day.

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

I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice.

The doors of churches, hotels, concert halls and reading rooms are alike closed against the Negro as a man, but every place is open to him as a servant.

Let me speak frankly: separate but equal is a fraud. It is the language that tried to push Rosa Parks to the back of the bus. It is the motif that determined that black and white people could not possibly drink from the same water fountain, eat at the same table or use the same toilets.

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

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.

There's a lot more hypocrisy than before. Racism has gone back underground.

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.

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.