Lee Grant Quotes

I let my game do the talking. I've had incidents like that but when I compare my own story to the stories that have happened forty or fifty years ago particularly to Jackie Robinson for example.

I sometimes think that courage is the thing that you need more than any other thing. It's fear that cripples us. It's fear that accounts for racism, it's fear that accounts for sexism, for xenophobia.

When I was a kid, no one would believe anything positive that you could say about black people. That's a terrible burden.

I couldn't find anyone doing something about the astounding injustices women were experiencing, so I decided to do something myself. I cannot tell you how many people ridiculed my efforts.

If you're white and you're wrong, then you're wrong; if you're black and you're wrong, you're wrong. People are people. Black, blue, pink, green - God make no rules about color; only society make rules where my people suffer, and that why we must have redemption and redemption now.

In 'To Kill a Mockingbird,' I was just playing and having a good time.

In England, I've never really had a problem with racism.

I continue to care for President Obama and for his family. I think that in many ways they are very courageous people, and I honor that, because I know what it means to live as a black person in a racist America.

The Afro-American is not a bestial race.

It is now time to mobilize, before it is too late, against the creeping legitimacy of racism in our society.

American democracy is a failure. It is a miserable failure. It has failed because it is a limited and racial and divisible democracy …. How can we fight for democracy in Burma, a country we have not seen, when we don't have democracy in Birmingham, a city we have seen.

In eighteen states in this white man's country and also in the District of Columbia, where the Nation's Capitol is located, intermarriage of the races is permitted by law. This fact is a national shame, or should I say crime, against the white race of America, and I pray God that these states and the Congress of the United States … will do something about this situation before it is too late

It worked for a long time. Each "stood" by the other. When the poor white lynched a Negro, the rich white protected him in court; the preacher protected him in church; the policeman looked away, the sheriff was easily intimidated, the juries rarely convicted, and the newspapers were "reasonable.

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.

When Thurgood Marshall went to a Southern town to try a case, he didn't know whether he would be alive at the end of the day.

As a child, I lived through and survived the segregated South. I sat at the back of the bus at a time when America wasn't yet as great as it could be.

My dad prepared me for the worst of times while also enabling me to succeed in the best. He taught me to confront the insidiousness of racism head on, no matter what the ramification, so it will not fester. Defeat it and get past it. That was The Talk. Nothing scared me after that.

I can see quite clearly that if there was a single event that launched me on the road to ultimate involvement at the heart of South African politics, it was an assault on an African woman by her white employer in a kitchen in Fort Hare.

I had a long time admiration for the Jewish people. Especially with their long time of courage, taking so much abuse for so long. I was only seven years old, but I could easily see the ungodly treatment that the white folks were handing the poor Jewish family whom I worked for.

I'm from South Carolina. I'm from a real cultured state, where there's still racism daily. Still, places are segregated.

There was so much racism when I was a kid, but it was also ignorant.

Racism is about education. Racism is ignorance.

Racism is not new. It was not invented just for you. So get bigger than that stuff.

I was lucky I had a mom who had seen it all. From seeing my grandfather march in the Civil Rights era, she understood the depth, character, and stability you need to go through racism. She taught me not to accept it to but deal with it and be better than it.

I remember going to a theater once, and there was a stairway that wound its way out to the back. And I was very young, a small child, and I said to my mom, 'Why are those people going up those stairs?' And she said, 'You know, I don't know how to tell you this, I don't know how to explain it, but it won't always be that way, because it's wrong.'