W. E. B. Du Bois Quotes

The white men of the South had better make up their minds that the blacks will remain in the South just as long as corn will tassel and cotton will bloom into whiteness.

The misperception about the South is that everybody is racist, and all black people are victims, that what was prevalent in the '60s is only relegated to the South.

I'm from Raleigh, N.C. It's my home, the most beautiful place ever - but it has some racist history.

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

The African-American experience is one of the most important threads in the American tapestry.

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.

When Thurgood Marshall became a lawyer, race relations in the United States were particularly bad.

America was founded on the fissure between slave states and free states, so these huge fault lines are just built into the American project. How we repress them, express them, deal with them, talk around them, think through them, don't think through them, is fascinating to me.

The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, in a time and place where no one was saying, 'Look how far we've come,' because we hadn't come very far, to say the least. Although Jackson's population was half white and half black, I didn't have a single black friend or a black neighbor or even a black person in my school.

I drank from colored water fountains and from the white water fountain just to see what it was like when I was a kid. What shocks me is that these kids today don't realize that this happened in many of our lifetimes.

Those days were very tough. All my teammates are white, and it was a different time. I couldn't go out to eat with the white players; I had to wait until someone brought something out to the bus. We couldn't stay in the same hotels.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.

Washington, D.C. in 1942 was not the easiest place in the world for a Negro to get along.

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.

The most dreadful of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States arises from the presence of blacks on its soil.

What we fly today is not an enduring symbol of our heritage, but the fighting flag of those who wanted to preserve a segregated South.

Was it the intention of the framers ... to forbid the states to enact and enforce segregation statutes? If one goes to the historical materials with this specific question, the only answer is in the negative. The framers did not intend or expect then and there to outlaw segregation, which, of course, was a practice widely prevalent in the North.

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

There were slaves in the North which were tolerated for some time, but the South was built upon slavery.

It will probably be asked, Why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the State [instead of colonizing them]? Deep rooted prejudices entertained by the whites, ten thousand recollections by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained, new provocations, the real distinctions which nature has made, and many other circumstances will divide us into parties and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.

When George Washington and the others created U. S. independence, they did not free the slaves; not long ago, a U. S. black athlete could not play baseball in the major leagues. And yet you called yours the freest country in the world.

The Southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the Reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination

The presence of the black man in this country is a curse to both races. It keeps the white man lying, stealing, misrepresenting, and the black man abusing, vilifying, and cursing, and neither white nor black can be Christian. I pray God you will continue in the great work in which you are engaged, and move this country to help the negro to emigrate to the land of his ancestors.

The North is fighting simply to turn loose all the niggers and whitewash the niggers in the blood of millions