John Hope Franklin Quotes

One must learn how to be black in America.

When people of color and their allies say today that Black Lives Matter, the nation must hear and see it through the lens of all that has come before and understand that they speak truth.

The real nightmare resides in a society that hides behind the mutually informing and poisonous notions of colorblindness and a post-racial society, a convenient rhetorical obfuscation that allows white Americans to ignore the institutional and individual racist ideologies, practices and policies that cripple any viable notion of justice and democracy.

Race is still real and you got to recognize it.

It's also important for those who promote those issues within the white community - the somewhat privileged community - to talk about issues affecting people of color.

I know black people love the idea that we finally have a beautiful, good-looking black president. But if he is doing awful things to us, we should wake up.

I started a lecture series that was inspired by my reporting on race in America. The 'Black in America' series launched on CNN in 2007 as an opportunity to freshen the national conversation on race.

Race in America is not a problem you can go over, or around or under. You've got to go through it.

To believe that the United States is post-racial requires an almost incomprehensible inability or unwillingness to stare truth in the face.

History looks very different from a black point of view. The heroes are different, and the eras get different names. The Progressive Era is no longer the Progressive Era, because it's the era in which more black people are lynched than in any other period in American history.

Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes

You can do pretty much anything you want to do in America as a black, including become president. Still, the legacy of our victimization, of our suffering and exclusion from the mainstream of American life, has left its mark.

It's hard to wrap my head around the fact that there are people who can't or won't see what Black Lives Matter is trying to accomplish.

If you're into social justice it's hard not to be on black people's side.

The first thing that Black Lives Matter had to do was remind people that racism existed in this country because when we had Obama, people thought we were post-racial. That was the debate. Is racism over? And very quickly, we understood that it was not over.

I've said numerous times the hardest job in America isn't being a professional athlete. It's not being a matador or having some job that puts your life at risk. The hardest job in America is being black, because it's the one thing you can't outrun.

As a freshman at Stanford University - a young black man - when O.J. Simpson was acquitted of murder, it was a joyful moment. I was happy, absolutely. It wasn't necessarily a matter of whether he was guilty or innocent, per se, it was a matter of finally seeing someone who looked like me have the justice system work in their favor.

I think, if you're in the United States, we've seen people trying to speak out in different ways and trying to make themselves heard about the United States' failure to move on generationally, given the long-festering wound of our history around race.

We are clear that all lives matter, but we live in a world where that's not actually happening in practice. So if we want to get to the place where all lives matter, then we have to make sure that black lives matter, too.

Black people, we are fully deserving of the room and space to fully express our humanity. This is what Black Lives Matter is truly about.

The performance of black American identity feels very different from actually living in a black body. There's a dissonance between inside and outside.

Our blackness and how to survive being black in America was something that our parents instilled in us extraordinarily well.

It's built into the fabric of this country, you know - oppressing black people socially, politically and economically. They all kind of go hand in hand.

Being called Black in America is the struggle to keep us moving and breathing over bloody water. Being a Nig**r or [Ni**a] without the context of history is like drowning in bloody water, dragging down those yet knowing to swim.

The burden of being black is that you have to be superior just to be equal. But the glory of it is that, once you achieve, you have achieved, indeed.