Karl Marx Quotes

The negro, whom a million Americans died to free, is, in present bond and future promise still a slave, whipped by circumstance, trodden under foot by iron and ineradicable prejudice; shut out forever from the opportunities which are the heritage of liberty, and, holding in his black hand the hollow parchment of his franchise as a freeman, looks through a slave's eyes at the impassable barriers which imprison him forever within the progress and achievement of a dominant and all-conquering race.

Blacks were so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

The Negro people, most exploited of the toilers, suffering from lynching and Jim Crowism, robbed of their constitutional rights, are being prepared to fight another war for 'democracy' in order to further enslave them.

You may set the Negro free, but you cannot make him otherwise than an alien to the European.

I found everywhere now the most direct antagonism between the two classes. The whites charge generally that the negro is idle, and at the bottom of all local disturbances, and credit him with most of the vices and very few of the virtues of humanity. The negroes charge that the whites are revengeful, and intend to cheat the laboring class at every opportunity, and credit them with neither good purposes nor kindly hearts..

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

When we finally got school buses for African American students in Georgia, the state legislature ordained that the front bumpers be painted black. Not even the school busses could be equal.

Apartheid cannot be reformed. It has to be eliminated.

It is not just Negroes but all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice.

The Southern States have enacted Black Codes with the aim of keeping former slaves subservient to the white race and compelled to labor for low wages.

This whole notion of a post racial America was nonsense from the very beginning. It was a bad idea, a bad notion, a bad formulation when it was first raised.

Stated briefly, the problem confronting the colored peoples of the world is how to live in freedom, peace and security without being invaded, subjugated, expropriated, persecuted and humiliated by Caucasians justifying their actions by the myth of racial superiority..

There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us ... Even when you cease to be slaves, you are far removed from being placed on an equality with the white man ... I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact

You complain that Negroes are a base class. Who makes and keeps the Jew or the Negro base, who but you, who exclude them from the rights which others enjoy?

To the average white man, a courthouse even in Mississippi is a place where justice is dispensed. To me, the black man, it is a place where justice is dispensed with.

If I may seem a bit moved about this, it is because of the hell I have been through because I am a Negro, and I think this committee ought to show a little more consideration for the democracy that Negroes are denied .... the menace that ought to be paid attention to is the menace where 14 or 15 million Negroes have no place to turn to feel that they are protected.

This county was formed for the white man, not for the black man.

the plain fact that throughout the world today organized groups of men by monopoly of economic and physical power, legal enactment and intellectual training are limiting with determination and unflagging zeal the development of other groups; and that the concentration of particularly economic power today puts the majority of mankind into slavery to the rest. But one thing is sure and that is that these ancestors of mine and their descendants have had a common history; have suffered a common disaster and have one long memory.

Southern men declare that their slaves are better off than hired laborers amongst us. How little they know, whereof they speak! There is no permanent class of hired laborers amongst us.

Slavery was gone but its inequalities remained.

What whites cannot experience and may never understand is that no matter which side of the bed I chose to wake up on, I would still be a black man in the racially divisive America.

The supremacy of the white race of the South must be maintained forever, and the domination of the negro race resisted at all points and at all hazards, because the white race is the superior race... This declaration shall run forever with the blood that feeds Anglo-Saxon hearts

The Negro does not possess the qualities to raise himself above slavery.

The Negro fought and bled and died in every war the white man waged, and he still won't give you justice. You nursed his baby and cleaned behind his wife, and he still won't give you freedom; you turned the other cheek while he lynched you and raped your women, but he still won't give you equality.

The racist conscience of America is such that murder does not register as murder really, unless the victim is white... blacks knew that white blood is the coin of freedom in a land where for four hundred years black blood has been shed unremarked and with impunity.