Jesse Helms Quotes

It took the United States Army to get one Negro into the University of Mississippi; it took troops to get a few Negroes in the white schools at Little Rock and another dozen places in the South.

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.

Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson understood that the South would continue to be an outcast unless it abandoned folkways that were injurious—to whites as well as blacks—and they employed the powers of the state to coerce recalcitrants into new patterns of behavior.

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.

When I went south in the 1960s, I knew I could die. If I went down there and did what I did up in Chicago and made all of those hatin' white folks laugh, then I would have been defeated.

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

White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife and your daughters, in your mills and factories? Frank Graham favors mingling of the races.

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

The negro race already occupy enough of this fair continent ... I would preserve for free white labor a fair country ... where the sons of toil, of my own race and own color, can live without the disgrace which association with negro slavery brings upon free labor.

Growing up in Georgia, it was sort of the last place to jump on the bandwagon of the integrated frontier. I have aunts and uncles and grandparents that experienced the 'whites only' and segregated schools.

The feelings, myths and prejudices about the Negro American which now seem so valid and real to some of our white contemporaries will take their place on the shelf along with the belief in witches and the notion that the earth is the center of the solar system.  Nobody knows as yet whether the future [of the race situation] is hopeless. All we know is that it can be made hopeless, if enough people choose to consider it so.

Southern change gonna come at last! Now your crosses are burning fast, Southern Man.

I was in sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and movie houses in the '60s.

The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.

All of you are aware of the tragic history of racism in America, but for a very long time, African-Americans and their white allies came together and they struggled and they stood up for justice and they stood up to lynching and they stood up to segregation and the stood up to a nation where African-Americans couldn't even vote in America.

I don't sign for white people.

I shall never fight in the armed forces with a Negro by my side... Rather I should die a thousand times, and see Old Glory trampled in the dirt never to rise again, than to see this beloved land of ours become degraded by race mongrels, a throwback to the blackest specimen from the wilds.

I'm so old that I can remember when most of the people promoting race hate were white.

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.

If the Negro is to achieve the goal of integration, he must organize himself into a militant and nonviolent mass movement.

Sydney Poitier, who said to Lester Maddox, Guess who's not coming to dinner? Never got a dinner!

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

I believe when a negro church is bombed, that a white church should be bombed.

In 1957, when I was in second grade, black children integrated Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. We watched it on TV. All of us watched it. I don't mean Mama and Daddy and Rocky. I mean all the colored people in America watched it, together, with one set of eyes.

Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white.