Martin Luther King Jr. Quotes

FHA valuators should not approve insurance for home loans in neighborhood with inharmonious racial groups.

The Federal Government should not pressure states to prohibit housing segregation…. Open occupancy is a form of extremism.

Previously, prejudices were personalized and individualized: FHA exhorted segregation and enshrined it as public policy. Whole areas of cities were declared ineligible for loan guarantees.

The only difference between [America] and South Africa, South Africa preaches separation and practices separation, America preaches integration and practices segregation. This is the only difference, they don't practice what they preach, whereas South Africa practices and preaches the same thing.

If, in [Federal Housing Administration] application, black folks were excluded from it, then you have to override that by going after those discriminatory practices.

I think Donald Trump is dividing the American people. He is not good for America. It's not good for our standing in the rest of the world. To divide people based on race, a color, a religion, a sexual orientation, it's just ... it's just wrong.

I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches.

Rosa Parks was an unlikely person, but she became an instrument of the people's will in that community who were tired. They said she was tired from working and perhaps she was - but she herself said later that she was spiritually tired and weary of being humiliated by being asked to move back so that a white person could occupy her seat.

It's getting almost so bad a colored man hasn't got any country.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of "interposition" and "nullification" - one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

See, the Black man gotta fly to get to something the white man can walk to.

There are people clamoring for the election of Donald Trump because they hate anyone whose skin is a slight shade different than theirs. They are calling for the eradication of Islam and want to build a wall along an arbitrary line that keeps Mexicans out of the land they probably have more of a right to cross than the people who now somehow think they have a right to be there.

America, you know, they always separate people because of race. They've been able to convince, 'The niggers are coming.' You know, the diversity that America has is so special. It's starting to really become a cool thing for young people. Not only because there are more mixes of people, but because people are more open-minded about each other. So I think in the future, America has a great, great opportunity, and mostly because of hip-hop.

In this country, these Negro leaders have Negroes sittin' - sitting down, thinking that that - there's dignity towards sitting in.

I think the notion that we are different just because of skin color, and that we should be kept apart or kept from interbreeding, is very hurtful.

They're trying to exterminate our race. I think, probably in a moral sense, the Jewish people have been a blight. I mean as a whole, not every Jew. And they probably deserve to go into the ashbin of history. But saying that and actually shooting or killing people in masses, are two different things. I'm not advocating extermination. I think the best thing is to resettle them in someplace where they can't exploit others. And I don't think they can live among themselves, I really don't.

There's a million white people better qualified than a black man to be president of America.

Lots of white people think black people are stupid. They are stupid themselves for thinking so, but regulation will not make them smarter.

I used to question this for years - what did our kids actually fight for? They would go in the service and go through all of that and come right out to be drowned in a river in Mississippi. I found this hypocrisy is all over America.

This president (Barack Obama) I think has exposed himself over and over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture . . . I’m not saying he doesn't like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist.

When a black person has no electricity, no water, they call it the ghetto. When white people have no electricity and no water, they call it camping.

White individuals that have been going to jail. Segregation still exists; discrimination still exists. A few isolated white people whose individual acts are designed to eliminate this, that or, or the next thing but, yet, it is never eliminated is in no way impressive to me.

Not a state within a state, but the Honorable Elijah Muhammad is, is saying that the black man, since the white man, has found it impossible to bring about integration, other than toke on a ta - other than on a token basis, and which proves that the, the two of us, the ex-slave and the master, can't live in the same house as equals.

I have nothing against a community that is made up of people who are Polish, or who are Czechoslovakians, or who are French Canadians or who are blacks trying to maintain the ethnic purity of their neighborhoods. This is a natural inclination... Government should not break up a neighborhood on a numerical basis. As soon as the Government does, the white folks flee.

I think that America could not become America until it dealt with the disenfranchisement of women and African Americans in the last century. It had to. America could not become America until it dealt with that. And did it deal with it perfectly? No. But it had to confront it.