Charles Barkley Quotes

There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president.

It’s time we faced facts. Southern people just don’t like Black people.

Racism is not merely a simplistic hatred. It is, more often broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others. Black America ever lives under that skeptical eye.

Only those who hate the Negro see hatred in the Negro.

The contempt we have been taught to entertain for the blacks, makes us fancy many things that are founded neither in reason nor experience

In the post-Civil War South few whites ever voted for black office seekers, and the legacy of their refusal remains with us in a variety of forms. The depiction of Mr. Obama as a Kenyan, an Indonesian, an African tribal chief, a foreign Muslim — in other words, as a man fundamentally ineligible to be our president — is perhaps the most searing. Tellingly, it is a charge never brought against any of his predecessors.

The reason people think it's important to be white is that they think it's important not to be black.

I doubted that the coconut-headed, chocolate-colored, typical coon who blacks my shoes every morning was fit for citizenship.

I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice.

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

This is a contest between the white man’s hope and black evil.

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

I would not use the influence of my office to deter citizens from punishing that nigger brute. I would have gladly resigned as governor and gone to Honea Path and led the mob myself.

Race prejudice is not only a shadow over the colored—it is a shadow over all of us.

So far as this particular negro is personally concerned, he may be dismissed as beneath contempt. There is a far graver side to the matter. This negro is regarded as a leader; he both reflects the sentiments of his race, and his utterance react upon his followers with an effect that was made sufficiently plain by the "vigorous applause" with which his slander was greeted by the negroes in the gallery. As the blatant mouthing of a mere negro, White's utterances are not worth notice; as a fresh manifestation of negroism, of what the negro's attitude is toward the white man, now and always, its significance should not be allowed to escape us.

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

The children of the white families in town were not permitted to associate with me, because my father was committing the then unpardonable crime, in Southern eyes, of educating negroes.

Color had been made the mark of enslavement and was taken to be also the mark of inferiority; for prejudice does not reason, or it would not be prejudice

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..

When we finally got school buses for African American students in Georgia, the state legislature ordained that the front bumpers be painted black. Not even the school busses could be equal.

The scars of racism still remain deeply imbedded in America.

What right do white racist, who believe their race is superior, have for complaining about black racists, who see something special in their own race? What right do black racists, who see a special character in their race, have for complaining about white racists?

If you seat these black buggers, the whole South will walk out.

Shame on America for the plight of the Negroes

Class prejudice is applied both the white and black poor, whose demographic traits are converging. But classism combines with latent and historic racism to create a particularly malicious brew. People are now assigned a whole range of supposedly underclass traits based on a single glimpse of skin color.