Emanuel Celler Quotes

We hold as undeniable truths that the governments of the various States, and of the confederacy itself, were established exclusively by the white race, for themselves and their posterity; that the African race had no agency in their establishment; that they were rightfully held and regarded as an inferior and dependent race, and in that condition only could their existence in this country be rendered beneficial or tolerable.

As a race, the African is inferior to the white man. Subordination to the white man is his normal condition. He is not his equal by nature and cannot be made so by human laws or human institutions. Our system, therefore, so far as regards this inferior race, rests upon this great immutable law of nature.

Also, of course, for most of this time most Americans thought of America as a white country with, at best, only a very segregated and subordinate role for blacks.

It is impossible for white men to live with the coloured races without adopting a conviction that…they have the right to command the services of the less civilized.

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.

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

No white man at the South serves another as his body servant to clean his boots, wait on his table, and perform menial services in his household!”

White folks still in the lead.

Honey, de white man is de ruler of everything as fur as Ah been able tuh find out. Maybe it's some place way off in de ocean where de black man is in power, but we don't know nothin' but what we see.

The Negro enslaved by his inferiority, the white man enslaved by his superiority alike behave in accordance with a neurotic orientation.

Sexism, like racism, goes with us into the next century. I see class warfare as overshadowing both.

As the eldest son of an Alabama sharecropper family, I was constantly troubled by a collage of North American southern behaviors and notions in reference to the inhumanity of people. There were questions that I did not know how to ask but could, in my young, unsophisticated way, articulate a series of answers.

White supremacy is not just a social arrangement: it is a race-based faith.

We are not anti-white. But we don't have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already... he has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.

There is a class system in acting just like in anything else. Black females fall in a category below black male actors.

The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.

It is not surprising ... that democracy has worked better in this country than elsewhere. This belief in the equality of all white folks–making skin color the gauge of worth and of citizenship rights–has caused the lowest to strive to become among the highest. Because of this great ferment, America has become the Utopia of the material world; the land of hope and opportunity. Without the transplanted African in their midst to bolster up the illusion, American would have, unquestionably, been a different place; but instead the shine as served as a mudsill upon which all white people alike can stand and reach toward the stars.... Here is the gift par excellence of the Negro to America.

The people desire to permit no equality between coloured people and white inhabitants, either in church or state.

I beg that some shadow of a colour bar, some little inequality between white and black before the law be retained.

They (negroes) had for more than a century before the Declaration of Independence been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race, either in social or political relations; and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect; and that the negro might justly and lawfully be reduced to slavery for his benefit. He was bought and sold and treated as an ordinary article of merchandise and traffic whenever a profit could be made by it.

We must keep this a White Man's country. Only by doing this can we be faithful to the foundations laid by our forefathers. This Republic was established by White Men. It was established for White Men. Our forefathers never intended that it should fall into the hands of an inferior race. Every effort to wrest from White Men the management of its affairs in order to transfer it to the control of blacks or any other color, or to permit them to share in its control, is an invasion of our sacred Constitutional prerogatives and a violation of divinely established laws

The general interest both of the white man and of the negroes requires that he should be kept as near to the condition of slavery as possible’

The white race ... will be proprietors of the land, and the blacks its cultivators; such is their destiny.

There is an unwillingness on the part of our people, harsh as it may be, for you free colored people to remain with us ... Even when you cease to be slaves, you are far removed from being placed on an equality with the white man ... I cannot alter it if I would. It is a fact

I never knew the lower classes had such white skins.