Isabel Wilkerson Quotes

When I was in high school if you were black and lived in Detroit, and you wanted to drive down to Florida to go on vacation, you had to plan to drive all the way through, because you couldn't stop in a hotel all the way through South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. We can't even fathom such a thing now, can we?

They don't let many black people in the governor's mansion in Alabama, unless they're cleaning.

Coming from the '50s, things were very violent. We were still being lynched. If I drove down through the South with my mother, I might not make it through one state without being bullied or harassed. I feel like unless you've been black for a week, you don't know.

Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!

You know the discrimination: African-Americans couldn't go to certain schools, they couldn't use certain restrooms, there were other kinds of routine biases against them.

The Circle Theatre, black people had to sit in the balcony. Any theater with a balcony, black people had to sit up there. Black people couldn't check into any hotel except their own. And black people couldn't eat anywhere except in their own restaurants.

America that is divided against itself cannot stand, and we cannot say we have all of this unity they say we have when black people are being discriminated against in every city in America I have visited.

With black people, there are 50 Hitlers over the course of history.

When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like 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.

In the Pentagon there is a surplus of bathrooms. Why? Because in the 1950s, there were separate bathrooms for white and colored people … in the Pentagon.

The Southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the Reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination

Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights were turning the Constitution into a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.

I have been refused entrance on the buses because I would not pay my fare at the front and go around to the rear door to enter. That was the custom if the bus was crowded up to the point where the white passengers would start occupying.

Happily, the days when overt racial discrimination and segregation were championed by social conservatives are long past.

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.

Ninety years after slavery, blacks were still segregated from whites. They still had separate drinking fountains, separate restrooms, separate neighborhoods, and separate schools. They still were expected to sit at the back of the bus.

I am not an American; I am one of twenty-two million black people who are victims of Americanism.

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.

The issue of racism and racial prejudice. It is very, very difficult to discuss. It is difficult to discuss the issue of apartheid. Many have made the observation that it is very difficult to find anyone in SA who ever supported apartheid because everyone was opposed, it was against our will and so on.

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

racism is alive and doing too well in America.

The poor black people in it make the black people in Gone With the Wind look like Malcolm X.

When you're white, the sky's the limit. When you're black, the limit's the sky.

Brown people wouldn't speak to someone who was black.