David Lammy Quotes

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.

Our criminal justice system affirmatively depends on inequality.

Separate and unequal didn't work 100 years ago. It will not work today.

I couldn't see why a black man wasn't allowed to drink out of the same water fountain or sit in the same bus or go to the same schools as a white guy.

Let me speak frankly: separate but equal is a fraud. It is the language that tried to push Rosa Parks to the back of the bus. It is the motif that determined that black and white people could not possibly drink from the same water fountain, eat at the same table or use the same toilets.

Ageism is as odious as racism and sexism.

There is no justice in social justice, and there is no equality in social equality.

Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.

And Justice for Some

We cannot go on, as we have gone on for more than half a century, with one great section of our population … set off from the real contribution to solving national issues because of a division of race lines …

Put simply, we must always remember that separate but equal is not equal.

Plessy v. Ferguson was a perversion of the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

I never rode a bus because I knew I would have to sit in the back.

In it not easy to remain rational and normal mentally in such a setting where, even in our airport in Montgomery, there is a white waiting room... There are restroom facilities for white ladies and colored women, white men and colored men. We stand outside after being served at the same ticket counter instead of sitting on the inside.

People have almost been lulled into complacency because there are no signs over the water fountains. But the signs have been in the policies. There's still housing discrimination and wage discrimination.

I just don't see why people are treated differently or with a different set of rules. It's just wrong.

I'd like to change the world. Eradicate poverty, racism, and sexism... all the usual things.

I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.

I never will let anyone make, maneuver me into making a distinction between the Mississippi form of discrimination and the New York City form of discrimination. It's, it's both discrimination; it's all discrimination.

Mr. Washington apologizes for injustice, he belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions, and opposes the higher training and ambitions of our brighter minds. The way for people to gain their reasonable rights is not by voluntarily throwing them away.

I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.

Rarely in my 45 years as a civil rights lawyer have I been so angry about an injustice as I am about what happened to Billy Ray Johnson.

When I was born in 1959, the hospital in which I arrived had separate floors for black babies and white babies, and it was then illegal for blacks and whites to marry in many states.

I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens and into the houses of presidents. And much more. But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.

If money, education, and honesty will not bring to me as much privilege, as much equality as they bring to any American citizen, then they are to me a curse, and not a blessing.