June Jordan Quotes

Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights were turning the Constitution into a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.

Freedom in America was not always flat. Racism made it un-flat, so that some people had privileges over other people.

Black Power alone is no more insurance against social injustice than white power.

Martin Luther King was bumped off unjustly, Adam Clayton Powell was bumped off unjustly, they took my title unjustly, they killed Megers Ever unjustly, all the integrators who love white folks, was unjustly kicked out of Washington, they've been deprived of education and poverty throughout the country.

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism.

Slavery has never been abolished from America's way of thinking.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

It is bad enough to be white and poor; it is worse still to be black, or brown, and female, and young, and poor. Simply said, race makes class hurt more.

History simmers beneath the surface in more communities than just Ferguson.

One of the tragedies of the struggle against racism is that up to now there has been no national organization which could speak to the growing militancy of young black people in the urban ghetto.

The stark reality is that crime happens in communities of color.

Race is not particularly interesting to me. Power is. Who has power and who doesn't. Slavery interests me because it's an incredible violation that has not stopped. It's necessary to talk about that. Race is a diversion.

You know, people'd always ask 'Why is Jesse Jackson running for the White House?' They never seen the house I'm running from.

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.

In the combat between the emerging Negroes of the South and the ruling white trash, I sympathize greatly with the Negro.

You complain that Negroes are a base class. Who makes and keeps the Jew or the Negro base, who but you, who exclude them from the rights which others enjoy?

Why can a Communist eat at a lunch counter in Selma, Alabama while a Black American veteran cannot?

I was angry with the Church because they were not aggressively pointing out the immorality of racism.

The South opposes the civil rights of Negroes and their protection by law. Witness lynchings where no one is punished, witness the Jim Crow laws that deny the letter and spirit of the Constitution. For democracy to have real meaning, the Negro must have the same civil rights as any other American citizen. It seems obvious that the South does not yet know what this war is all about

For years now I have heard the word “Wait”. It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never”.

I walked around feeling, in a sense, that people of color, we began at the bottom of a slave ship. We were enslaved; we picked cotton. There was Honest Abe, who wore a top hat and was taller than anyone and who said, 'Enough is enough; slavery must end.' And then, black people could stand up again. But after that, we didn't catch up.

There's this false notion that you have to separate and choose between issues of class and issues of race. What people do when they say that you need to separate class from race is that they are really just saying that people of color should come second.

I cannot possibly believe that I have it made while so many black brothers and sisters are hungry, inadequately housed, insufficiently clothed, denied their dignity as they live in slums or barely exist on welfare.

Sometimes, you feel like, 'Am I going to be upset about this as a black person or as a woman first? Or am I gonna be both?' Because some things inherently affect black women; some things affect you as a woman and not a black person; and some things just affect you as a black person.

I cannot salute the flag; I know that I am a black man in a white world. In 1972, in 1947, at my birth in 1919, I know that I never had it made.