John Lewis Quotes

I couldn't see why a black man wasn't allowed to drink out of the same water fountain or sit in the same bus or go to the same schools as a white guy.

I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice.

racism is alive and doing too well in America.

... all Americans are the prisoners of racial prejudice.

I grew up in Houston, and I remember we had separate drinking fountains, and black people sat in the balcony of the theater... We had an African-American housekeeper growing up who was really like my second mother. I thought it was silly - hatred just because of the color of somebody's skin.

Negroes are not qualified to be integrated within his command. When I find them qualified, they will be integrated.

I grieve, however, that anyone could be stupid enough, in any part of our country, to arrest the Vice-Presidential candidate of a recognized party because, on his way to speak to citizens of the United States, he tried to go through a door which was marked as the entrance for people of color. It seems to me completely incredible that, in a State where colored people are allowed to enlist and go to war and be killed for their country, there should exist anything so senseless as a rule which forces human beings to enter through separate doors according to their color. It is fundamentally un-Christian and wrong.

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.

There was segregation everywhere. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn't even go into the same restaurants.

I remember what it was like to grow up in the South in the 1960s and 1970s. Discrimination isn’t something that’s easy to oppose. It doesn’t always stare you in the face. It moves in the shadows. And sometimes it shrouds itself within the very laws meant to protect us.

As a teenager I had never been able to accept the fact of having to go to the back of a bus or sit in the segregated section of a train. The first time I had been seated behind a curtain in a dining car, I felt as if the curtain had been dropped on my selfhood.

Segregation is not humiliating but a benefit...

As an African American child growing up in the segregated South, I was told, one way or another, almost every day of my life, that I wasn't as good as a white child.

I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.

I have the hatred of apartheid in my bones.

There's a lot of racism still alive and still active.

When I was born in 1959, the hospital in which I arrived had separate floors for black babies and white babies, and it was then illegal for blacks and whites to marry in many states.

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.

People get bent out of shape about the fact that when I was a kid, you could not drink out of certain water fountains. Well, the water was the same.

Segregation now, segregation tomorrow and segregation forever!

Anything that could be conceived of that would separate black people from white people was devised and codified by someone in some state in the South. There were colored and White waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor's offices to the bus stations, as people may already know.

I beg that some shadow of a colour bar, some little inequality between white and black before the law be retained.

There was no need to send Negro troops to Cuba …. It is criminal.

In the Pentagon there is a surplus of bathrooms. Why? Because in the 1950s, there were separate bathrooms for white and colored people … in the Pentagon.

Segregation is a disease of white people, not of colored people.