Andre Holland Quotes

Whites must be made to realize that they are only human, not superior.

For black people the war [WWII] provided an opportunity to accelerate their demands for equality…. Black Americans highlighted the distance between this ideal of America and the reality of ongoing racial inequality, often through the black press and civil rights organizations

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.

If any man claims the Negro should be content... let him say he would willingly change the color of his skin and go to live in the Negro section of a large city. Then and only then has he a right to such a claim.

When I wrote 'The Secret Life of Bees,' I was writing about civil rights.

I grew up in the 1970s, but I don't think a whole lot had changed from the '60s. Oh, it had changed in the law books - but not in the kitchens of white homes.

Being so closely related to the South, barbecue was part of segregation and helped defeat it.

We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.

The Klan had used fear, intimidation and murder to brutally oppress over African-Americans who sought justice and equality and it sought to respond to the young workers of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the same way.

What worries me is that 'post-racial' America is not that different from the Americas that have preceded us, and it might not ever be.

For a black student to work in southwest Mississippi for example - or in the Delta in 1960, 1961, 1962 - was high-risk work.

The suggestion that Negroes should be treated as equals to white men woke some of the deepest and ugliest fears in the American mind

By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them back in the image of God and democracy.

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.

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.

The New Deal ultimately undermined Jim Crow’s prospects. The very legislation embraced by Southern segregationists created at first mere chinks, then whole openings for social change that were grasped by an incipient, soon powerful, movement for equal rights for Blacks.

It is not just Negroes but all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes

In approaching this problem [school desegregation], we cannot turn the clock back...

Racism was once just racism, a terrible bigotry that people nevertheless learned to live with, if not as a necessary evil then as an inevitable one. But the civil-rights movement, along with independence movements around the world, changed that.

It's good that segregation is over.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement.

Our scientists grapple with the difficulties of placing a man on the moon, but the immediately troubling concern of our society is whether men of different races can sit together at a lunch counter.

George Wallace is gone; Bull Connor is dead. He's not coming back.

I come up in a segregated 1943 atmosphere of segregation.