Jidenna Quotes

He has no idea what it was like to grow up in the South, where you had to hold your head down.

What we fly today is not an enduring symbol of our heritage, but the fighting flag of those who wanted to preserve a segregated South.

The separate water foundations, park benches, bathrooms and restaurants of the Jim Crow South startled me. These experiences motivated my lifelong study of the status of African Americans and the sources of improvement in that status.

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.

I majored in Southern history in college, and much of my early work at my first job - as a staff writer at 'Memphis' magazine - focused on race relations.

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.

If you want to understand America, it's slavery.

I've done a lot of research about the Civil Rights movement, and I'm fascinated with how difficult it would have been for a black man to show feelings toward a white woman in that time period.

After graduating high school, Betty attended the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute in Birmingham, Alabama, the alma mater of both her parents. My mother relocated to New York because she refused to accept the oppressive racism of the Jim Crow south.

When you live in the South, you're constantly part of the civil rights movement.

The Bible Belt, the religious South, is the section of the country that practiced slavery until the war made them give it up. They practiced segregation. They practiced lynchings. I don't see any great value in that.

I grew up in the segregated South, right here in Lynchburg, Virginia.

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.

Jim Crow was king... and I heard a game in which Jackie Robinson was playing, and I felt pride in being alive.

Being so closely related to the South, barbecue was part of segregation and helped defeat it.

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, in a time and place where no one was saying, 'Look how far we've come,' because we hadn't come very far, to say the least. Although Jackson's population was half white and half black, I didn't have a single black friend or a black neighbor or even a black person in my school.

My ancestors fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War; I was raised in Natchez, Miss.; I performed in the Confederate Pageant for a decade; I dug ditches and loaded trucks with black men who taught me more than any book ever could; and I graduated from Ole Miss. Anyone who survived that is a de facto expert on the South.

I want to say this about my state. When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over all these years either.

People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same.

My mother was from Mississippi, or is from 'Mississippi;' my father was from Alabama. He speaks about conditions in Mississippi and Alabama. They were really the poster children for the bad public laws that segregated, according to race, in our country.

That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the South. They didn't look back, and they often didn't tell their children about it. They didn't want to talk about it. It was too painful, what they'd gone through and the caste system of the South, which was Jim Crow.

It always has been, and always will be the position of The Independent that the white folks will prepare Jim Crow accommodations for Negroes just so long as the race produces a Jim Crow leadership. Men would not make cotton, corn and other commodities to sell if there was no market for them; and in like manner, the white man would not offer the Negro second class or Jim Crow accommodations if the Negro would not accept them; and the Negro may expect to be Jim Crowed, buzzard-roosted, discriminated against, kicked about, kicked off the street cars and hauled on elevators with trash and garbage, boxes and plunder, so long as he submits to such conditions and grins at the white man with his hat in his hand. The Independent is informed that Billy Sunday will preach to the Jim Crow Negroes of Atlanta in the Jim Crow meeting provided for Negroes only in his tabernacle Monday night. Now, the gospel of Jesus Christ knows no color line. It is as susceptible to the black man as the white man. Jesus died for all; not for the white folk or for the black folk, but for every man who would seek him diligently in spirit and truth; and, if Billy Sunday can’t preach to Negroes and white folks under the same tent, at the same time, then he ought not to preach to either

Was it the intention of the framers ... to forbid the states to enact and enforce segregation statutes? If one goes to the historical materials with this specific question, the only answer is in the negative. The framers did not intend or expect then and there to outlaw segregation, which, of course, was a practice widely prevalent in the North.

President Bush blames the LA riots on the 60's. Which 60's is he talking about the 1960s or the 1860s when Lincoln freed the slaves?

Why can a Communist eat at a lunch counter in Selma, Alabama while a Black American veteran cannot?