Lyndon B. Johnson Quotes

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

To pass this law and then hope that South Carolina … would do justice to the negro is absurd. She has 291,000 whites and 412,000 blacks. To pass such a law would be for the governing power to divest itself of the government and hand it over to a subject and despised caste ... The same is true, more or less, of all the South

Ours has not been a racially democratic society for 300 years.

The white man believes in equality, but apparently believes the white man is more equal than the Indian.

Opportunity seems to be color-coded here in America

Tonight the Negro knows from his radio and television that a Congo native can be a locomotive engineer, but in Jackson [Mississippi] he cannot even drive a garbage truck.

Racial inequality is a big problem.

The only difference between me and those other great Yankees is my skin color.

If you are white, racism is too easily ignored and forgiven, regarded as of burning concern only to the ethnic minorities, and therefore of relatively marginal significance.

Sometimes black people really want to hold onto our oppression - 'This is ours! This belongs to us.' You can't just talk about equality for somebody else. Let's pass it on. Let's pass it on to somebody else. At the end of the day, it is all about inequality.

We would be silly to say that race issues don't exist in 2014.

Codifying discrimination in our laws should be something we read about in American history, not on the front pages of today's American newspapers and magazines.

Racism is a moral catastrophe, most graphically seen in the prison industrial complex and targeted police surveillance in black and brown ghettos rendered invisible in public discourse.

We have this long history of racism in this country, and as it happens, the criminal justice system has been perhaps the most prominent instrument for administering racism. But the racism doesn't actually come from the criminal justice system.

It's more dangerous to be black in America...If you are a normal white American, the truth is you don't understand being black in America, and you instinctively underestimate the level of discrimination and the level of additional risk in a way that you have to be corrected.

The suggestion that Negroes should be treated as equals to white men woke some of the deepest and ugliest fears in the American mind

I thought the Navy at times resembled a Southern plantation that had somehow escaped the Civil War. Blacks swabbed the decks, shined shoes, did the cooking, washed the dishes, and served the food. Virtually no other jobs were open to them.

The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line - the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.

You get racism crossing the street; it's in the very fabric of American society.

It saddens me that African Americans - when they express their pain, when they protest about police violence, when they question inequality, when they raise issues of bondage and discrimination - African Americans are seen as not patriotic.

Civil rights in this country is unfinished business, and racism is alive and well.

If there is inequality, and that equates with colour, then I'm going to deal with it.

I'm not familiar particularly with Hillary Clinton's neighborhood, but I wish people were a little bit more curious about what we call privilege and about why it's there. Black people in this country have no choice but to be curious. We have to know. I wish folks would do a little bit more investigation.

When the world's moving towards being the most inclusive it's ever been, it's unthinkable that certain basic aspects of life are still so unfair for the black community.

One of the founding tenets of racism: a society that will never allow white people to think that because they are white, they won't succeed.