Ronald Reagan Quotes

Detroit is really a model for how wealthier and whiter Americans escape the costs of public goods they'd otherwise share with poorer and darker Americans.

Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available.

You want the good life? You live where white people live, you go to school where white people go to school, and you shop where white people shop.

Ninety years after slavery, blacks were still segregated from whites. They still had separate drinking fountains, separate restrooms, separate neighborhoods, and separate schools. They still were expected to sit at the back of the bus.

If you talk to the Whites in Mississippi they will tell you, 'You can go to any school you want to; we don't see race.' Biggest lie ever told.

I think that wealthy white people would like to have a country that resembles the Fifties, when all the minorities were tucked away in ghettos and paid in very low wages but on the surface it was very bright and shiny and free and the rest of the world would look on it longingly.

'Park Avenue: Money, Power and the American Dream' is an intentionally angry film. How could it not be when the chance of an infant dying is five times greater on the Bronx Park Avenue than on Manhattan's Park Avenue just across the Harlem River?

Life is now a war zone, and as such, the number of people considered disposable has grown exponentially, and this includes low income whites, poor minorities, immigrants, the unemployed, the homeless, and a range of people who are viewed as a liability to capital and its endless predatory quest for power and profits.

Both chronic, long-term poverty and downward mobility from the middle class are in the same category of things that America likes not to think about.

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.

I have never seen any good resulting from educating the Negro.

I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956, with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins - I was only 16 years old - we went down to the public library trying to check out some books, and we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors. It was a public library.

In those days, man, in the '50s, black people in the South... We didn't recognize contracts that much. And we didn't recognize marriages that much, either.

Now we maintain that we cannot be afford to be concerned about 6 percent of the children in this country, black children, who you allow to come into white schools. We have 94 percent who still live in shacks. We are going to be concerned about those 94 percent.

There is no more apartheid in South Africa than in the United States.

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

Negroes who have been so long inconvenienced and denied opportunities for development are naturally afraid of anything that sounds like discrimination.

You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

The black ghetto in prewar America was a place of deep poverty, the product of relentless discrimination in housing and employment ... But it was also a place where African-American Culture thrived.

He was murdered by every member of the gospel who has remained silent about racial discrimination—who has hidden behind the stained glass windows of his church.. He was murdered by every Negro who accepted segregation.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

We are at great risk in our democracy for failing to understand the great depths of poverty.

We insist that educationally and socially we maintain a segregated society …