Tom Joyner Quotes

Brown versus the Board of Education is no longer the white person's problem.

Brown v. Board is the foundation by which all Americans can look for hope - hope for their children, hope for their families, and hope for a better future.

All Southern state colleges and universities are open to black students.

The United States Office of Education has likewise been guilty of spreading racial equality propaganda. In a report to the press, Dr. John W. Studebaker, head of the Office of Education, and his Negro assistant, Dr. Ambrose Caliver, who is racial adviser in the office of Education, called upon the colleges and universities of the South to open their doors to Negro students

In approaching this problem [school desegregation], we cannot turn the clock back...

I have consistently opposed forced bussing to achieve integration.

I filed a brief as a friend of the court in the U. of Michigan to keep affirmative action at the U. of Michigan, which I attended the law school. And I was one of the original sponsors of making the Martin Luther King birthday a federal holiday.

Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't carry just a piece of cloth to symbolize his belief in racial equality; he carried the American flag.

I have been a long and strong supporter of civil rights in my whole career. I led the fight to get the voting rights act re-enacted. I have been a strong supporter of affirmative action. I believe in it strongly.

I admired Truman, among many other things, because he integrated the Army. I admired JFK because the very first civil rights legislation was passed at his insistence. JFK showed what you could do, though he was a deeply flawed person, as we all now know.

By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them back in the image of God and democracy.

The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race

If you decide to walk into the schools with the little colored kids, take me along, Daddy. God bless you.

The rights, privileges and responsibilities of full American citizenship. This is all that the Negro asks. He will not willingly accept less. As long as America offers less, she will be that much less a democracy. The whole way is the American way

The Problem We All Live With

School integration did not come to be the day after the Brown ruling was issued. Progress took years, and it took passion, strength, and courage from a large group of committed individuals.

When population shifts - brought about by fair housing laws, affirmative action and landmark school desegregation rulings - political power is challenged as well.

As the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case has shown us, separate is not always equal.

It took the United States Army to get one Negro into the University of Mississippi; it took troops to get a few Negroes in the white schools at Little Rock and another dozen places in the South.

We're primarily interested in solving the problem of 20 million black people. And if integration is going to solve the problem tomorrow, then let's integrate. But since the Supreme Court issued its desegregation decision seven years ago, and you only have about six or seven percent integration now, on an educational level, that means that the black man trying to use integration as a means of solving his problem will be another 100 years just getting integration on an educational level.

My association with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference is sort of predated by an effort that we were a part of here in New York City regarding the reaction to this 1954 Supreme Court [Brown v Board of Education] decision.

It has been nine years since the Supreme Court decision outlawing segregated schools, yet less than ten per cent of the Negro students in the South are in integrated schools. That isn't integration, that's tokenism!

I'm against an all-white anything or an all-black anything.

I often tell people I don't care whether they join the NAACP or some other group, but you better join something.

Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly.