Walter Annenberg Quotes

On the field, blacks have been able to be super giants. But, once our playing days are over, this is the end of it and we go back to the back of the bus again.

We need to intentionally invest in health, in home ownership, in entrepreneurship, in access to democracy, in economic empowerment. If we don't do these things, we shouldn't be surprised that racial inequality persists because inequalities compound.

The Great Depression, they come out with the New Deal, black people didn't have access to those government stimulus packages. The New Deal set up what is known as the modern-day middle class. We didn't have access to programs - the G.I. Bill, Social Security, home loans - none of that.

I know there has long been a great frustration among the African Americans in Nevada over their belief that we have not adequately responded to their desires to become more educated and more productive citizens.

The primary victims of Katrina, those who were given the least help by the government, those rescued last or not at all, were overwhelmingly people of color largely hidden from the mainstream of society.

When I look at 55 percent of our black men dropping out of school, how bad off are we going to be when we need some lawyers?

There is no such thing as a black middle class.

The Negroes are facing the alternative of rising in the sphere of production to supply their proportion of the manufacturers and merchants or of going down to the graves of paupers.

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

... 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.

If this country is a melting pot, then either the Afro-American didn't get in the pot or he didn't get melted down.

I think it goes back to whether or not race and class - that is, race and poverty - is not becoming even more of a constraint. Because with the failing public schools, I worry that the way that my grandparents got out of poverty, the way that my parents became educated, is just not going to be there for a whole bunch of kids.

The uncomfortable reality we must face is that California, like the nation as a whole, has treated generations of African Americans and Latinos as largely disposable.

We cannot afford to leave the poor behind.

Since Bush has been in office, African-American women have fallen behind in terms of income and wages.

Educated and productive young people are needed to help lift their countries out of poverty and create a wealthier, more secure world.

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 fact that so many of your people are today residents and citizens of the United States, lending their influence to our civic and economic life, which has meant so much to our development.

My thinking has always been that the worst problem we have with regard to lack of inclusion is the terribly low labor force participation rates and terribly high unemployment rates of young men, especially young men in ethnic minority groups and, in particular, young black men.

We may believe in the state's responsibility to alleviate the crushing poverty that afflicts 40 percent of Latin America's population, but most of us also affirm that there is no better cure for that poverty than a stronger, more globally integrated economy.

If the Negroes are to remain forever removed from the producing atmosphere, and the present discrimination continues, there will be nothing left for them to do.

If we don't figure out a way to create equity, real equity, of opportunity and access, to good schools, housing, health care, and decent paying jobs, we're not going to survive as a productive and healthy society.

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.

The Negro is trying to enter a social community and a tradition of work-and-income which are in the process of vanishing even for the hitherto privileged white worker Jobs are disappearing under the impact of highly efficient, progressively less costly machines.

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.