Audley Moore Quotes

We blacks were the first people embracing Obama, long before the people at expensive fundraisers were supporting him. We gave him his first love, 96 percent of blacks voted for him in 2008. Yet today we are the number one in unemployment, with 16 percent of American blacks out of work.

The white man's happiness cannot be purchased by the black man's misery.

I hate to say this about the Republican establishment, but their view of Civil Rights is to tip the black waiter five bucks at the country club.

For people who have been slaves for 150 years doing all the work to be called lazy and shiftless by the man who was sitting on the porch—that is a phenomenon in itself.

... if the United States is indeed the great melting pot, the Negro either didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.

...on every sin which a colored man commits, the just white man must make a considerable discount, because of the colored man's antecedents. The heirs of slavery cannot with any sort of justice, be required to be as clear and straight and upright as the heirs of ancient freedom. And besides, whenever a colored man commits an unright action, upon his head is the guilt of only about one tenth of it, and upon your heads and mine and the rest of the white race lies fairly and justly the other nine tenths of the guilt.

Perhaps no statistic better illustrates the enduring legacy of our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens, sub-Americans, and sub-humans than the wealth gap.

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.

The conditions that we are suffering force us to address the real issues that affect the life and well-being of the majority of our people. That is why the call for reparations and justice in dealing with the problems of Black people is so relevant now.

“America begins in black plunder and white democracy.” I appreciate the day off today to finally fully read The Case for Reparations. . . . I grew up feeling superior (hah, how white of me) because I was from New England and my part of the country didn’t have slaves, or so I’d been taught. . . . Yes, our original collective sin and unpaid debt. Yes, reparations. Yes, on this day.

A Christian people who have for two hundred years kept a race in bondage, deprived of the advantages of civilization and religion, owe them a debt of gratitude which it would seem ungenerous to withhold.

The legacy of slavery comes from the sustained political, legal and economic effort to link permanently an entire group of people to poverty - and to mystify that systematic disenfranchisement by making up something called race, which could serve as a distraction.

There is no such thing as a black middle class.

The Negro today perhaps has more political power than ever before and he is worse off than ever before. It is not votes but dollars that count in this civilization.

All whites benefitted from American slavery.

We don't want something for youth at risk, we want something for black youth at risk.

Blacks were so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

He was murdered by every member of the gospel who has remained silent about racial discrimination—who has hidden behind the stained glass windows of his church.. He was murdered by every Negro who accepted segregation.

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

We have three hundred years of neglect to pay for.

What does it amount to if the Black man, after having been made free by the letter of your law ... is to be subject to the [former] slaveholder's shotgun?

What then to the American black Slave is your Fourth of July? I answer, a day that reveals to him ... constant injustice.

We cannot forget that America was built on Africa.

The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War II for no really good reason by our most liberal President. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slavelike inequalities.

In this enlightened age there are few, I believe, but what will acknowledge that slavery as an institution is a moral and political evil in any country.... I think it, however, a greater evil to the white than to the black race, and while my feelings are strongly enlisted in behalf of the latter, my sympathies are more strong for the former.