Robert H. Jackson Quotes

The complete destruction of all enforced segregation is now in sight.

Certain it is that the Negro soldiers are not fighting and dying to maintain the status quo for their race. Their place now is in the front of the bullets of the enemy, and below the bombs in enemy planes. Bullets, or threats of bullets, are not likely to cause them to bow and scrape once they are home.

Today we know with certainty that segregation is dead. The only question remaining is how costly will be the funeral.

The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King.

In the United States, the Supreme Court's decision of 1954, outlawing segregation in school systems, was greeted with mixed feelings of hope and skepticism by African-Americans.

The civil rights movement would experience many important victories, but Rosa Parks will always be remembered as its catalyst.

When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.

If you do away with segregation, allow negro [sic] children in white schools, churches, etc. you might as well drop a few bombs on us and not prolong the agony.

The abolition of the separate school system in the south raises serious practical problems.... We face the abolition of the public school system. Boldness is essential but wisdom is indispensable.

If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy. God bless you.

White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.

I am obliged to confess that I do not regard the abolition of slavery as a means of warding off the struggle of the two races in the Southern states. The Negroes may long remain slaves without complaining; but if they are once raised to the level of freemen, they will soon revolt at being deprived of almost all their civil rights; and as they cannot become the equals of the whites, they will speedily show themselves as enemies.

Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson understood that the South would continue to be an outcast unless it abandoned folkways that were injurious—to whites as well as blacks—and they employed the powers of the state to coerce recalcitrants into new patterns of behavior.

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.

In the Fifties, there were certain places we couldn't ride on the bus, and now there is a possibility of a black man being in the White House. You have to feel good about it.

What I did at Ole Miss had nothing to do with going to classes. My objective was to destroy the system of white supremacy.

The black press, some liberal sportswriters, and even a few politicians were banging away at those Jim Crow barriers in baseball. I never expected the walls to come tumbling down in my lifetime.

As the civil rights struggle progressed, Americans responded to the justice of the cause, shedding layers of the crusty armor that shielded the white majority from contact with its large black minority. There are layers left. It feels so much better to be on good terms with one another.

There was never a time you could get the majority of people in Alabama or Mississippi, or even southern Delaware, to vote to end segregation. What changed things was the rule of law, the courts. Brown v. Board of Education was ushered in by a movement, but it was a legal decision.

It's what the people wanted at the time, but the country could not be half-segregated and half-integrated, just as it could not be half-slave and half-free back in the 1800s.

It took the United States Army to get one Negro into the University of Mississippi; it took troops to get a few Negroes in the white schools at Little Rock and another dozen places in the South.

The white population could not possibly be unaffected by those events - some whites more stubborn in their defense of segregation, but others beginning to think in different ways. And the black population was transformed, having risen up in mass action for the first time, feeling its power, knowing now that if the old order could be shaken it could be toppled.

I was in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses in the '60s.

The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.

They want a race war. We must be peaceful people. They are gonna poke and poke and poke, and our government is going to stand by and let them do it. We must be - we must take the role of Martin Luther King, because I do not believe that Martin Luther King believed in, "Kill all white babies."