Ed Smith Quotes

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, in a time and place where no one was saying, 'Look how far we've come,' because we hadn't come very far, to say the least. Although Jackson's population was half white and half black, I didn't have a single black friend or a black neighbor or even a black person in my school.

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.

In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what whites looked like.

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.

It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.

We insist that educationally and socially we maintain a segregated society …

A very large proportion of Virginians would want to continue segregation of the races because we believe we can provide a better system of education by doing that.

I don’t have a white community; that doesn’t exist in Detroit. We are surrounded by 80 percent white suburbs.

The Southern institution of racial segregation or racial separation was the correct, self-evident truth which arose from the chaos and confusion of the Reconstruction period. Separation promotes racial harmony. It permits each race to follow its own pursuits, and its own civilization. Segregation is not discrimination

Our clear goal must be the advancement of the white race and separation of the white and black races.

Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights were turning the Constitution into a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of 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.

We believe in the separation of the races in all phases of life.

It shall be unlawful for any person, corporation, or association of persons to maintain or operate any college, school, or institution where persons of the white and negro races are both received as pupils for instruction.

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.

My father was pretty independent. He was - he was arrested once in Nashville when he was on one of his sales trips because he had a black - guy to lunch. So that took a fair amount of courage at the time.

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.

When I was in high school if you were black and lived in Detroit, and you wanted to drive down to Florida to go on vacation, you had to plan to drive all the way through, because you couldn't stop in a hotel all the way through South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. We can't even fathom such a thing now, can we?

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.

I cannot face my God much longer knowing that his black creatures are held separate and distinct from his white creatures in the game that has given me all that I can call my own.

Coming from the '50s, things were very violent. We were still being lynched. If I drove down through the South with my mother, I might not make it through one state without being bullied or harassed. I feel like unless you've been black for a week, you don't know.

Let me speak frankly: separate but equal is a fraud. It is the language that tried to push Rosa Parks to the back of the bus. It is the motif that determined that black and white people could not possibly drink from the same water fountain, eat at the same table or use the same toilets.

I was born in segregated Birmingham, Alabama. I didn't have a white classmate till we moved to Denver.

The policies enacted during segregation are still being felt in Birmingham.