H. Rap Brown Quotes

What is a Dixiecrat? A Democrat. A Dixiecrat is nothing but a Democrat in disguise.

Roosevelt’s New Deal would have been impossible without the support of the Southern segregationists.

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.

I knew the Civil Rights Act was right … but I also loved the South and didn't want it used as the whipping boy of the Democratic Party

The Democrats co-opted the credit for the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But if you go back and look at the history, a larger percentage of Republicans voted for that than did Democrats. But a Democrat president signed it, so they co-opted credit for having passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.

As a general rule the Southern Delegates were not a creditable class.

Harry Truman knows I am against him on this [civil rights] program. I just don’t think Congress should try to cram his program down the throats of Southern states.

Booker Washington was essentially the head Republican boss in the South. He was a power broker.

In 1964, the GOP ceased to be the party of Lincoln and became the party of Southern whites.

The Republican Party, in many ways, grew up as a reaction to that [ segregation], and a lot of people have misunderstood that.

Louis Brandeis never had the opportunity - or he never sought the opportunity I should say - to work closely with African American lawyers. He was also a Southern Democrat, you know, at a time when both parties were supportive of segregation.

Bill Clinton was a liberal who could appeal to conservative-leaning Bubba voters.

In our state, I'm really proud of the fact that the ones who overturned Jim Crow in Kentucky were Republicans fighting against an entirely unified Democrat Party. So I am proud to be Republican. I can't imagine being anything else.

American history and the history of baseball are bound up together: our racial politics can be described and traced through it.

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.

We could beat back Kennedy on Civil Rights, but Lyndon [Johnson] knows how to beat us.

You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

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.

[On the 1948 Dixiecrats:] … a political movement based openly and almost entirely upon racism.

The Solid South ….The sectional unity of the Southern people has been the governing idea and bane of their politics …. Every Presidential canvass becomes a battle between the sections.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

The Senator’s objections to “legislating morality,” his criticisms of the Supreme Court, and his advocacy of “states’ rights” all became the shorthand for an anti-civil rights appeal -- and were clearly understood as such by voters in the North and South

We live with contradictions all the time. The South in the 1960s were among the most patriotic in the country, yet at the same time it was they who thwarted the Federal Government and resisted the law of the land.

Preachers were leaders in the Civil Rights Movement in the South because they were influenced by their congregations while most other Southerners were under the influence of the Chamber of Commerce. The Clergy were the best able to withstand the white economic pressure that could intimidate and harm most others.