Ulysses S. Grant Quotes

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

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

My father was the first to see through the schemes of the white man.

The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.

In the combat between the emerging Negroes of the South and the ruling white trash, I sympathize greatly with the Negro.

It is impossible for white men to live with the coloured races without adopting a conviction that…they have the right to command the services of the less civilized.

This is a contest between the white man’s hope and black evil.

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

I am for the negro against the crocodile, but for the white man against the negro.

The black world squirms beneath the feet of the white in impotent fury or sullen hate.

One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.

Racism has its boot squarely wedged on the neck of black communities, and we don't want to be told that hard work and responsibility are the answer.

Jazz is a racist musical form invented by whites to enslave blacks.

Racism is a way to gain economic advantage at the expense of others. Slavery and plantations may be gone, but racism still allows us to regard those who may keep us from financial gain as less than equals.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

What is our greatest enemy? Segregation.

Racism has been for everyone like a horrible, tragic car crash, and we've all been heavily sedated from it. If we don't come into consciousness of this tragedy, there's going to be a violent awakening we don't want. The question is, can we wake up?

We are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... he has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

The only white man you can trust is a dead white man.

Old white people have pretty much always been the bad guys, the keepers of the hegemonic and reactionary flame, the folks unwilling to share the category of American with others on equal terms.

I hate to say this about the Republican establishment, but their view of Civil Rights is to tip the black waiter five bucks at the country club.