Benjamin E. Mays Quotes

If one lives in a country where racism is held valid and practiced in all ways of life eventually, no matter whether one is a racist or a victim, one comes to feel the absurdity of life....Racism generated from whites is first of all absurd. Racism creates absurdity among blacks as a defense mechanism.

There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that *they* must accept *you*. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love.

There is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I, as much as any other man, am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

I think President [Barack] Obama deeply underestimated the force of white supremacy in American life.

The logic behind white domination is to prepare the black man for the subservient role in this country.

The essence of White Supremacy is this: they are people who want to keep things as they are. That their children's children's children might be a different color is something very alarming to them - in short they are committed to the maintenance of the static image.

Among the thousand white persons, I am a dark rock surged upon, and overswept.

Yes, I'm an extremist. The Black race here in North America is in extremely bad condition. You show me a Black man who isn't an extremist and I'll show you one who needs psychiatric attention.

All of this in [Donald] Trump now has become so overt that it's difficult when we talk about repression not to talk about white supremacy, not to talk about its legacy, from slavery to lynching to mass incarceration, and what it has developed into.

To avoid the consequences of posterity the mulattos give the blacks a first class letting alone. There is a frantic stampede white-ward to escape from Jamaica's black mass.

We have to undo the millions of little white lies that America told itself and the world about the American Black man.

Racial oppression of black people in America has done what neither class oppression or sexual oppression, with all their perniciousness, has ever done: destroyed an entire people and their culture.

The system of white supremacy is intended to make folks of color doubt themselves, their intelligence, their abilities, their very sanity. And so it's important to remember that folks of color know their own realities.

One day I realized I was living in a country where I was afraid to be black. It was only a country for white people. Not black. So I left. I had been suffocating in the United States... A lot of us left, not because we wanted to leave, but because we couldn't stand it anymore... I felt liberated in Paris.

Whites they pretended to ignore, as they busily lived mirror-image white lives.

I worked at an all-black swimming pool in the east side of Wilmington, I was involved in what the Negroes, I mean, blacks were thinking, what they were feeling.

The United States has been called the melting pot of the world. But it seems to me that the colored man either missed getting into the pot or he got melted down.

There were times when I asked myself whether I was being principled or simply a coward.... I was wrapped in the cocoon of tennis early in life, mainly by blacks like my most powerful mentor, Dr. Robert Walter Johnson of Lynchburg, Virginia. They insisted that I be unfailingly polite on the court, unfalteringly calm and detached, so that whites could never accuse me of meanness. I learned well. I look at photographs of the skinny, frail, little black boy that I was in the early 1950s, and I see that I was my tennis racquet and my tennis racquet was me. It was my rod and my staff.

A Negro just can't be whipped by somebody white and return with his head up in the neighborhood, especially in those days, when sports and, to a lesser extent show business, were the only fields open to Negroes, and when the ring was the only place a Negro could whip a white man and not be lynched.

I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is physical difference between the two which, in my judgment, will probably forever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality, and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I, as well as Judge Douglas, am in favor of the race to which I belong having the superior position.

A white man killed the mules and our cows that knocked us right back down. And things got so tough then I began to wish I was white.

Racism as a form of skin worship, and as a sickness and a pathological anxiety for America, is so great, until the poor whites -- rather than fighting for jobs or education -- fight to remain pink and fight to remain white. And therefore they cannot see an alliance with people that they feel to be inherently inferior.

The black people of America have been victims of violence at the hands of the white men for four hundred years, and following the ignorant Negro preachers, we have thought that it was godlike to turn the other cheek to the brute that was brutalizing us.

The continued lynchings and other crimes against negroes, whether in New England or the South, and unspeakable political exponents of white supremacy, according to all recorded history, augur ill for America's future.

My mother worked in the white world, but I lived almost exclusively in a black world. I don't think I had ever seen a white teacher until I got to high school.