Carol Moseley Braun Quotes

What we fly today is not an enduring symbol of our heritage, but the fighting flag of those who wanted to preserve a segregated South.

If you want to understand America, it's slavery.

The history of blacks is complicated, fragmented, disturbing to contemplate - not a neat trail of challenges met or of felled trees blocking the path to the mountain top.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

As long as the waving symbol of another American’s pride is the shameful symbol of another American’s pain, we have bridges to cross in this country and we better get across them.

That there are many free negroes in the Northern Cities who run at the sound of a Southerner’s footstep for fear of being unable to prove their freedom, there cannot be a doubt.

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.

American history is not clean.

Every red stripe in that flag represents the black man's blood that has been shed.

The history of Black Americans in South Carolina is riddled with trials and tribulations.

The African-American experience is one of the most important threads in the American tapestry.

Since the middle of the twentieth century, our understanding of the American past has been revolutionized, in no small part because of our altered conceptions of the place of race in the nation's history.

Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents' then-illegal and interracial marriage.

When I see the Confederate flag, I see the attempt to raise an empire in slavery. It really, really is that simple. I don't understand how anybody with any sort of education on the Civil War can see anything else.

We cannot forget that America was built on Africa.

America was founded on the basis of racism and bigotry.

It’s getting almost so bad a colored man hasn’t got any country…. The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to Hell!

The scars of racism still remain deeply imbedded in America.

There are not enough Yankees between Cape Cod and Hell to prevent Southern people from doing as they please with the Negro.

Everything that America has done crudely and shamelessly to suppress the Negro, England in Sierra Leone has done legally and suavely …

The story of the Negro in America is the story of America. It is not a pretty story.

For nearly a century and a half, this country deluded itself into thinking that its greatest calamity, the Civil War, had nothing to do with one of its greatest sins, enslavement. It deluded itself in this manner despite available evidence to the contrary.

North as well as South, the Negroes have emerged from slavery into a serfdom of poverty and restricted rights.

It takes a willful disregard of history to appreciate how white Southerners could look at the Confederate battle flag and see states' rights or a way of life or a tradition - and not one human being whipping another, which was a common occurrence.

For centuries in this country, black people were seen as three-fifths of a person. So when you hear the national anthem or you see an American flag as an African American person who has experienced the effects of that dehumanizing existence, it's not going to mean the same.