Dee Rees Quotes

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

I drank from colored water fountains and from the white water fountain just to see what it was like when I was a kid. What shocks me is that these kids today don't realize that this happened in many of our lifetimes.

However, while we should certainly celebrate the demise of overt official racism, we must also critically examine where we are at this historical moment, recognize the many challenges ahead and reaffirm our commitment to making Brown v. Board a reality.

When I wrote 'The Secret Life of Bees,' I was writing about civil rights.

It’s time we faced facts. Southern people just don’t like Black people.

Happily, the days when overt racial discrimination and segregation were championed by social conservatives are long past.

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

Black people cannot look to government to solve their problems.

Dr. King's general principles are universal. But the things he confronted took place in another era.

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.

Although his crusade in 1957 occurred at a time in our nation's history when race divided all, Reverend Graham refused to preach in segregated audiences.

In '42,' it's like the '40s where racial equality had come into the consciousness of a lot of people, whereas in the 1900s it was sort of a new thing.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework?

I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.

We have defeated Jim Crow, but now we have to deal with his son, James Crow Jr., esquire.

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.

Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem.

We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.

Shaking hands with the Queen of England was a long way from being forced to sit in the colored section of the bus going into downtown Wilmington, North Carolina.

I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.

For a black student to work in southwest Mississippi for example - or in the Delta in 1960, 1961, 1962 - was high-risk work.

I'd like to think I would have signed the Civil Rights bill and wouldn't have had any issues with it.

By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.

Racial tolerance was not possible on American television in the early 1960s