Ruth J. Simmons Quotes

To me, as I see it, reparations would be something that is fairly specific to the descendants of slaves, and it would also be an official apology from the United States government for slavery.

Being black, I'm involved in the reparations movement. It's focused toward the African-American audience. We could begin to heal.

When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 100 years.

I have been trying to create a campaign to have our country make an apology for slavery, for the way that blacks were treated before the Civil War and after the Civil War.

There's no doubt that when it comes to our treatment of Native Americans as well as other persons of color in this country, we've got some very sad and difficult things to account for. I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged. I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it's Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds.

Race, redemption and healing - that's my thing.

I teach at Eastern University, which is highly committed to doing work among the poor and the oppressed peoples of the world. We have a special commitment to the city.

Sorry Day falls on the eve of Reconciliation Week, giving us the chance to ask whether we are making progress in the wider challenge of reconciling Indigenous and other Australians.

I realize I will always be the poster child for police brutality, but I can try to use that as a positive force for healing and restraint.

Let me tell you, never before in the history of this planet has anybody made the progress that African-Americans have made in a 30-year period, in spite of many black folks and white folks lying to one another.

Food might be more immediately important than history but if you don't understand what's been done to you - by your own people and the so-called 'they' - you can never get around it.

FOR a long time the conviction has been dimly felt in the community that, without prejudice to existing institutions, the legal day of weekly rest might be employed to advantage for purposes affecting the general good.

I'm one of those people that thinks the world changes in smaller and in more mysterious ways than a lot of people like to think. A lot of traditional charities and organizations do things that on the surface seem like a good idea, but it doesn't change the way that people think about interacting with other people.

The country in which reparations actually happen is a very different one than the one we live in.

If we don't figure out a way to create equity, real equity, of opportunity and access, to good schools, housing, health care, and decent paying jobs, we're not going to survive as a productive and healthy society.

The United States will never be able to pay us [Blacks] all they owe us. They don't have the money.

I don’t want to see the issue of Black reparations for slavery close the door to historic memory and continuing responsibility.

We can't talk about community values without being prepared to invest in those very same communities.

The eight men who are survivors of the syphilis study at Tuskegee are a living link to a time not so very long ago that many Americans would prefer not to remember, but we dare not forget. It was a time when our nation failed to live up to its ideals, when our nation broke the trust with our people that is the very foundation of our democracy. It is not only in remembering that shameful past that we can make amends and repair our nation, but it is in remembering that past that we can build a better present and a better future. And without remembering it, we cannot make amends and we cannot go forward…. The United States government did something that was wrong—deeply, profoundly, morally wrong. It was an outrage to our commitment to integrity and equality for all our citizens.

The Holocaust of Nazi Germany is certainly no less of a historic crime than the Holocaust that went on for centuries against African-Americans. That process of reparations, and a truth and reconciliation discussion, was extremely helpful in the country of Germany, and we need to have that here.

There's injustices within our system that we inherited from this time, from slavery, and until we confront our past, we're not going to be able to heal the wounds for our future.

We are concerned with that curious bunch of nonconformists who explain their participation in negative terms: that bunch of do-gooders that goes under all sorts of names - liberals, leftists, etc. These are the people who argue that they are not responsible for white racism and the country's 'inhumanity to the black man.'

When we're talking about slavery... we're really talking about the web of relationships that exists between whites and blacks from 1619 to 1865 to now.

I believe that Trayvon Martin's life might well have been spared if many of us who care about racial justice had raised our voices much, much sooner and much, much more loudly about the routine stereotyping and profiling of young black men and boys.

I believe that we have a duty to look frankly at the social conditions around us and to work to do what we can to address the specific needs which we find.