Harris Faulkner Quotes

I know my destiny. I was born into animosity, bigotry and hatred. We had water for white folks, and water for coloured folks. White lines, black lines. I came from Beaufort in South Carolina, and it was tougher than Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi.

Racism is a much more clandestine, much more hidden kind of phenomenon, but at the same time it's perhaps far more terrible than it's ever been.

These barbarities [American lynchings] have found many apologists, on the ground that the negroes are licentious and dishonest--as, indeed, many of them are. But who set them the example, and educated them in these vices? In too many cases the white population, and even their legal authorities.

For every Farrakhan who riles and poisons black America, there are twenty white bigots who seek to take us into organized murder and mayhem.

My grandmother, when she was young, would've walked past shops where some folks had out a sign that said, 'No Mexicans or dogs allowed.'

The hate directed against the colored people here in St. Louis has always given me a sad feeling because when I was a little girl I remember the horror of the East St. Louis race riot.

The challenges African-Americans are facing today are rooted in the system of slavery.

When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like it.

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth.

Racism in America has not been completely eradicated. It is a sturdy pestilence. Racism and intolerance raise their heads repeatedly, not only in America but in every land.

We didn't have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.

My brother and sister had a much worse childhood, I think, because they were older, and they had to deal with a lot more racism because they grew up in the '70s and I grew up more in the '80s. So they had to deal with crosses being burned on their lawn and their dogs being poisoned.

I saw the discrimination that was happening towards Middle Easterners, Muslims and other brown people who had nothing to do with 9/11. It suddenly felt like a duty of mine to talk about some of the crazy things that were going on and make fun of how stupid it was.

Let us look at Jim Crow for the criminal he is and what he has done to one life multiplied millions of times over these United States and the world. He walks us on a tightrope from birth.

A vote for George Wallace is a vote for the past and oppression.

Every red stripe in that flag represents the black man's blood that has been shed.

Most of my experience with racism comes from living in the South.

Racism is like a horror movie. Black kids die because of racism. I don't know what's more horrifying than that.

The history of Black Americans in South Carolina is riddled with trials and tribulations.

The whites were really brutishly ignorant, blitheringly, so they killed people sometimes - just came into the African-American community and maimed people because they didn't agree with God's choice for the colors of the people's skin.

Racism is wrong, racism is very dangerous.

Hate demands existence, and he who hates has to show his hate in appropriate actions and behaviors; in a sense, he has to become hate. That is why the Americans have substituted discrimination for lynching.

I believe racism has killed more people than speed, heroin, or cancer, and will continue to kill until it is no more.

Race prejudice is the devil unchained.

If we were to wake up some morning and find that everyone was the same race, creed and color, we would find some other causes for prejudice by noon.