Ward Connerly Quotes

Until racial justice and freedom is a reality in this land, our union will remain profoundly imperfect.... The Negro is going to get justice or this society will be ripped apart.

The black situation has changed. They finally realized they're Americans.

The present Supreme Court is more dangerous to the legitimate hopes and aspirations of black people in this nation than any Bull Connor with a firehose.

I believe that Trayvon Martin's life might well have been spared if many of us who care about racial justice had raised our voices much, much sooner and much, much more loudly about the routine stereotyping and profiling of young black men and boys.

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.

Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.

If Barack Obama now, or some black person in the future, should become president, neither Jesse Jackson nor Al Sharpton would be out of a job. A black president can't end black misery; a black president can't be a civil rights leader or primarily a crusader for racial justice.

Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy and consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.

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.

This is Selma, Alabama where there are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.

The doublespeak of the American neoconservatives who conjured up the term "reverse racism" (was) to attack those who fought against White supremacy. This so-called ‘colorblind’ ideology has reversed the gains made during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and is actually commonsense among White Americans. It informs policymakers from the White House to the Supreme Court and has been used to justify the retreat from egalitarianism.

Separate schools for African Americans in effect branded a whole race with the stigma of inferiority and degradation

For black people the war [WWII] provided an opportunity to accelerate their demands for equality…. Black Americans highlighted the distance between this ideal of America and the reality of ongoing racial inequality, often through the black press and civil rights organizations

Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes

The only part of my mother's experience that still gets to me is the way she and people like her were looked down upon for asking America to be America, for asking for full and equal participation in our democracy.

We've come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

In this country, we force millions of people - who are largely black and brown - into a permanent second-class status simply because they once committed a crime.

When we address the disparities facing black people, we get a lot closer to a true democracy where all lives matter.

Black Americans have organized all across this country because we have an unequal justice system, not because anyone demands special privileges.

I can't turn around without hearing about some 'civil rights advance's White people seem to think the black man ought to be shouting 'hallelujah's Four hundred years the white man has had his foot-long knife in the black man's back — and now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe six inches! The black man's supposed to be grateful? Why, if the white man jerked the knife out, it's still going to leave a scar!

When you say I want to talk about racial justice, that's not the same as saying I want to do something about racial justice.

Until racial justice and freedom is a reality in this land, our union will remain profoundly imperfect.

The patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable. ... We have to come to terms with some hard truths about race and justice in America.

If, with the nation watching, three black women at three different levels can't get justice... for this community, you tell me where you're going to get it in our country.

All you need to understand is that the officer carries with him the power of the American state and the weight of an American legacy, and they necessitate that of the bodies destroyed every year, some wild and disproportionate number of them will be black.