Dee Rees Quotes
We shouldn't be discriminating against each other. The whole 'light skin versus dark skin' is an idea we need to break down.
Block, Melissa. "For 'Pariah' Director, A Personal, And Painful, Story." NPR, 26 Dec. 2011.
This was a very courageous speech for the President to give. Senator Hubert Humphrey had proposed civil rights legislation. At the time most of the racial conservative members of Congress were Democrats and not Republicans as they would become after Civil Rights legislation actually passed in 1964. There was little possibility that the civil rights law would pass as the Southern Democrats could filibuster it in the Senate. None the less Truman supported the legislation and the principle of equal rights despite the fact that he was a Southerner and he knew he would lose the support of the conservative wing of his party.
The reason this quotation is important, it was the first time in American history that a President had tied racial discrimination to morality. Before that other Presidents had argued against segregation on pragmatic grounds or on legal, Constitutional grounds. Kennedy’s private moral declaration had a huge impact on Black leaders throughout the country who heard about it by word of mouth. That statement forged a bond between JFK and Blacks while most whites did not see anything striking in the statement.
Diandrea Rees is an American screenwriter and director. She is known for her feature films Pariah (2011), Bessie (2015), Mudbound (2017), and The Last Thing He Wanted (2020). Rees has also written and directed episodes for television series including Empire, When We Rise, and Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams.
