Sojourner Truth Quotes

The existence of laws in the States where the newly emancipated negroes reside, which discriminated with gross injustice and hardship against them as a class, was the evil to be remedied …. The one pervading purpose, was protection of the newly-made freeman and citizen from the oppression of those who had formerly exercised unlimited dominion over him.

On the horizon loom a growing number of iconoclasts and Atheists, young black men and women who can read think and ask questions; and who impertinently demand to know why Negroes should revere a god that permits them to be lynched, Jim-Crowed, and disenfranchised.

He was murdered by every member of the gospel who has remained silent about racial discrimination—who has hidden behind the stained glass windows of his church.. He was murdered by every Negro who accepted segregation.

For all Sunday’s denouncing of sins, he never mentioned rotten, stinking, hell-born race prejudice. It is pitiable when we think of the thousands of white men in this country, claiming to be ministers of the gospel,—claiming to be ambassadors of God, representatives of Jesus Christ; and yet sitting down quietly in the midst of this spreading leprosy of race prejudice, and doing nothing to stay its ravages, content to have it spread, and to curse, as it is doing, both races,—embittering the Negro and debasing the white man.

For people who have been slaves for 150 years doing all the work to be called lazy and shiftless by the man who was sitting on the porch—that is a phenomenon in itself.

One hundred years ago the slave was freed. One hundred years later, the negro remains in bondage to the color of his skin…. The negro today asks for justice. We do not answer him—we do not answer those who lie beneath this soil—when we answer “Patience.”

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

God has been the author of segregation and opposition to segregation is opposition to God.

The trend of psychology, education, anthropology, and social science is toward environmentalism in the explanation of group differences, which means that the racial beliefs which defended caste are being torn away. It also means, by implication, that the white majority group in power is accused of being the cause of the Negro's deficiencies and unhappiness.

The artist must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. the history of the capsulize era is characterized by the degradation of my people: despoiled of their lands, their true culture destroyed...denied equal protection of the law, and deprived their rightful place in the respect of their fellows.

One hundred years of delay have passed since President Lincoln freed the slaves, yet their heirs, their grandsons, are not fully free. They are not yet freed from the bonds of injustice. They are not yet freed from social and economic oppression. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

He was murdered by every white minister of the gospel who remained silent behind the safe security of his stained glass window. He was murdered by the irresponsibility of every politician from governor on down who had fed his constituents the stale bread of hatred and the spoiled meat of racism. He was murdered by the timidity of the Federal government that is willing to spend millions of dollars a day to defend freedom in Vietnam, but cannot protect the rights of its citizens at home…. He was murdered by the cowardice of every Negro who passively accepts the evils of segregation and stands on the sidelines in the struggle for justice.

What did you expect? I don’t know why you’re so surprised. When you put your foot on a man’s neck and hold him down for 300 years, and then you let him up, what’s he going to do? He’s going to knock your block off.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

I also know that while I am black I am a human being, and therefore I have the right to go into any public place. White people didn't know that. Every time I tried to go into a place they stopped me.

When you educate a negro, you educate a candidate for the penitentiary or spoil a good field hand.

I doubted that the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored, typical coon who blacks my shoes every morning was fit for citizenship.

If he presents himself to vote, he runs a risk to his life. Oppressed, he can complain, but if he finds only whites among his judges… His son is excluded from the school where the descendants of Europeans come to be instructed. In theaters he cannot buy for the price of gold the right to be placed at the side of one who was his master; in hospitals he lies apart. The black is permitted to beseech the same God as whites, but not to pray to him at the same alter.

The most dreadful of all the evils that threaten the future of the United States arises from the presence of blacks on its soil.

Blacks were so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

It always has been, and always will be the position of The Independent that the white folks will prepare Jim Crow accommodations for Negroes just so long as the race produces a Jim Crow leadership. Men would not make cotton, corn and other commodities to sell if there was no market for them; and in like manner, the white man would not offer the Negro second class or Jim Crow accommodations if the Negro would not accept them; and the Negro may expect to be Jim Crowed, buzzard-roosted, discriminated against, kicked about, kicked off the street cars and hauled on elevators with trash and garbage, boxes and plunder, so long as he submits to such conditions and grins at the white man with his hat in his hand. The Independent is informed that Billy Sunday will preach to the Jim Crow Negroes of Atlanta in the Jim Crow meeting provided for Negroes only in his tabernacle Monday night. Now, the gospel of Jesus Christ knows no color line. It is as susceptible to the black man as the white man. Jesus died for all; not for the white folk or for the black folk, but for every man who would seek him diligently in spirit and truth; and, if Billy Sunday can’t preach to Negroes and white folks under the same tent, at the same time, then he ought not to preach to either

Daily the Negro is coming more and more to look upon law and justice, not as protecting safeguards, but as sources of humiliation and oppression. The laws are made by men who have little interest in him; they are executed by men who have absolutely no motive for treating the black people with courtesy and consideration; and, finally, the accused law-breaker is tried, not by his peers, but too often by men who would rather punish ten innocent Negroes than let one guilty one escape.

To pass this law and then hope that South Carolina … would do justice to the negro is absurd. She has 291,000 whites and 412,000 blacks. To pass such a law would be for the governing power to divest itself of the government and hand it over to a subject and despised caste ... The same is true, more or less, of all the South

I don't believe in segregation. I believe in slavery.

In speeches to negroes you must remember that argument has no effect upon them: they can only be influenced by their fears, superstition and cupidity. Do not attempt to flatter and persuade them.... Treat them so as to show them you are the superior race, and that their natural position is that of subordination to the white man.