William Easterly Quotes

The South politician preaches to the poor white man, "You got more than the blacks, don't complain. You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain. And the Negro's name Is used, it is plain, For the politician's gain, As he rises to fame And the poor white remains On the caboose of the train; But it ain't him to blame -- He's only a pawn in their game.

In the South the white men used to call all Black men “boy” until they got to be old enough to call them “uncle.” It was sex-the feat of sexual competition. When they used to get liquored up and talk they would always say, “The schoolroom leads to the bedroom” to justify school segregation.

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.

The politicians... needed the rural people and used them as ruthlessly as Negroes were used when they were needed. They needed to play voter against voter and all of them against "the Negro" -- and they needed the poor whites' approval of acts which the dominant group's more informed minds could not wholly approve. They needed poor whites to be their yes-men, moral henchmen quieting their leaders' uneasy consciences.

In the combat between the emerging Negroes of the South and the ruling white trash, I sympathize greatly with the Negro.

Poor whites have been pitted against poor blacks to assuage the conscience of the affluent.

A very large proportion of Virginians would want to continue segregation of the races because we believe we can provide a better system of education by doing that.

The white men were roused by a mere instinct of self-preservation ... until at last there had sprung into existence a great Ku Klux Klan, a veritable empire of the South, to protect the Southern country.

The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again.

The two great divisions of society are not the rich and poor, but white and black. And all the former, the poor as well as the rich, belong to the upper class, and are respected and treated as equals.

The Southern States have enacted Black Codes with the aim of keeping former slaves subservient to the white race and compelled to labor for low wages.

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

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

The general interest both of the white man and of the negroes requires that he should be kept as near to the condition of slavery as possible’

These barbarities [American lynchings] have found many apologists, on the ground that the negroes are licentious and dishonest--as, indeed, many of them are. But who set them the example, and educated them in these vices? In too many cases the white population, and even their legal authorities.

When we hear of any Negro trying to get into a white school in Mississippi, you can be sure it is a Negro who has just been imported for that purpose.

Segregation is a disease of white people, not of colored people.

There is no reason to equivocate or lie about it. The Mississippi Constitutional Convention of 1890 was held for no other reason than to eliminate the nigger from politics…let the world know it just as it is.

This county was formed for the white man, not for the black man.

We are tired of being lynched physically in Mississippi, and we are tired of being lynched spiritually and economically in the North.

Our clear goal must be the advancement of the white race and separation of the white and black races.

The children of the white families in town were not permitted to associate with me, because my father was committing the then unpardonable crime, in Southern eyes, of educating negroes.

Three fourths of the (Southern white) people assume that the negro will not labor, except on compulsion; and the whole struggle between the whites on the one hand and the blacks on the other hand is a struggle for and against compulsion. The negro insists, very blindly perhaps, that he shall be free to come and go as he pleases; the white insists that he shall come and go only at the pleasure of his employer. The whites seem wholly unable to comprehend that freedom for the negro means the same thing as freedom for them. They readily enough admit that the Government has made him free, but appear to believe that they still have the right to exercise over him the old control.

I found everywhere now the most direct antagonism between the two classes. The whites charge generally that the negro is idle, and at the bottom of all local disturbances, and credit him with most of the vices and very few of the virtues of humanity. The negroes charge that the whites are revengeful, and intend to cheat the laboring class at every opportunity, and credit them with neither good purposes nor kindly hearts..

In the post-Civil War South few whites ever voted for black office seekers, and the legacy of their refusal remains with us in a variety of forms. The depiction of Mr. Obama as a Kenyan, an Indonesian, an African tribal chief, a foreign Muslim — in other words, as a man fundamentally ineligible to be our president — is perhaps the most searing. Tellingly, it is a charge never brought against any of his predecessors.