Josephine Baker Quotes

The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling because when I was a little girl I remember the horror of the East St. Louis race riot.

Civil rights in this country is unfinished business, and racism is alive and well.

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.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

For a black male, the sound of the blues is pre-Civil Rights. It's oppression.

I know my destiny. I was born into animosity, bigotry and hatred. We had water for white folks, and water for coloured folks. White lines, black lines. I came from Beaufort in South Carolina, and it was tougher than Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

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.

I grew up in Houston, and I remember we had separate drinking fountains, and black people sat in the balcony of the theater... We had an African-American housekeeper growing up who was really like my second mother. I thought it was silly - hatred just because of the color of somebody's skin.

If white America is ready to extend complete democratic rights to colored people, there will be no race, no racial tension and no racial prejudice on either side, but we can be sure that any movement 'back to normalcy' in race relations will be bitterly resisted by colored people. It is now up to white America to make its choice...

The two things I feared as a boy most were rattlesnakes and white people.

I grieve, however, that anyone could be stupid enough, in any part of our country, to arrest the Vice-Presidential candidate of a recognized party because, on his way to speak to citizens of the United States, he tried to go through a door which was marked as the entrance for people of color. It seems to me completely incredible that, in a State where colored people are allowed to enlist and go to war and be killed for their country, there should exist anything so senseless as a rule which forces human beings to enter through separate doors according to their color. It is fundamentally un-Christian and wrong.

American democracy is a failure. It is a miserable failure. It has failed because it is a limited and racial and divisible democracy …. How can we fight for democracy in Burma, a country we have not seen, when we don't have democracy in Birmingham, a city we have seen.

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.

Civil Rights is all right for you. You don’t have and Negroes in your district.

Although slavery may have been abolished, the crippling poison of racism still persists, and the struggle still continues.

I feel like racism isn't over.

I believe that racism is a problem, and we need to do something about it.

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.

If a Negro got legs he ought to use them. Sit down too long, somebody will figure out a way to tie them up.

Had it not been for the race problem early thrust upon me and enveloping me, I should have probably been an unquestioning worshipper at the shrine of the established social order and of the economic development into which I was born.

What the apartheid system was really good at doing was convincing groups to hate one another.

Think of all the hate there is in Red China, then take a look around to Selma, Alabama.

I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida.

There's a lot of racism still alive and still active.

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.