Chicago Tribune Quotes

The Negro has the simplest of alternatives: live a life of constant humility or ever-threatening danger.

This county was formed for the white man, not for the black man.

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

You start out in 1954 by saying, 'Nigger, nigger, nigger.' By 1968 you can't say 'nigger' – that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

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’

If the blacks make war upon us they must abide by the awful retribution that will follow

One of the things that makes a Negro unpleasant to white folk is the fact that he suffers from their injustice. He is thus a standing rebuke to them.

If there ever are great revolutions there, they will be caused by the presence of the blacks upon American soil. That is to say, it will not be the equality of social conditions but rather their inequality which may give rise thereto.

The prejudice against color, of which we hear so much, is no stronger than that against sex. It is produced by the same cause, and manifested very much in the same way. The negro's skin and the woman's sex are both prima facie evidence that they were intended to be in subjection to the white Saxon man.

The South politician preaches to the poor white man, "You got more than the blacks, don't complain. You're better than them, you been born with white skin," they explain. And the Negro's name Is used, it is plain, For the politician's gain, As he rises to fame And the poor white remains On the caboose of the train; But it ain't him to blame -- He's only a pawn in their game.

I found everywhere now the most direct antagonism between the two classes. The whites charge generally that the negro is idle, and at the bottom of all local disturbances, and credit him with most of the vices and very few of the virtues of humanity. The negroes charge that the whites are revengeful, and intend to cheat the laboring class at every opportunity, and credit them with neither good purposes nor kindly hearts..

The scars of racism still remain deeply imbedded in America.

You have no understanding of what it is to live in a community surcharged with an idle, dissolute, vicious, ignorant negro population just emerged from slavery.

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

The worst disease from which the society of our nation suffers is ... the treatment of the Negro.

These barbarities [American lynchings] have found many apologists, on the ground that the negroes are licentious and dishonest--as, indeed, many of them are. But who set them the example, and educated them in these vices? In too many cases the white population, and even their legal authorities.

A coloured man can tell, in five seconds dead, whether a white man likes him or not.

Not only are whites kicking us; they are telling us how to react to being kicked.

Whites don’t like to see the nigger with too much … White people was afraid that money will make the nigger act like his own man.

The color of your skin is your uniform in this ultimate battle for the survival of the West.

The condition of white people in this State is such that they must labor in competition with the negro laborer.

Segregation is a disease of white people, not of colored people.

Negrophobia tended to hold even sparse Reconstruction institutions ... at low throttle, and played a part in Reconstruction’s incompleteness

To attempt to explain a system like segregation to a 6 year child is a very difficult thing.

Modern technical civilization does not seem to be as well handled by the black man as by the white man in the United States