Marcus Garvey Quotes

Blacks were so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.

Civil rights in this country is unfinished business, and racism is alive and well.

People have been killing because of racial differences since the time of Adam and Eve, but in this country racism has been primarily aimed at African Americans.

The city of Memphis has demonstrated that neither character nor standing avails the Negro if he dares to protect himself against the white man or become his rival.

I am astonished at the strong feeling of dislike and contempt—I might almost say hatred—which the bulk of the whites have for their black neighbours.

If you do away with segregation, allow negro [sic] children in white schools, churches, etc. you might as well drop a few bombs on us and not prolong the agony.

We're not so much anti-black as we are pro-white.

The melting pot failed to function in one crucial area. Religions and nationalities, however different, generally learned to live together, even to grow together, in America. But color was something else. Reds were murdered like wild animals. Yellows were characterized as a peril and incarcerated en masse during World War II for no really good reason by our most liberal President. Browns have been abused as the new slave labor on farms. The blacks, who did not come here willingly, are now, more than a century after emancipation by Lincoln, still suffering a host of slavelike inequalities.

I don’t believe in Black majority rule ever—not even in 1000 years.

The action of President Roosevelt in entertaining that nigger will necessitate our killing a thousand niggers in the South before they learn their place again.

Integration in the fields of education, housing, transportation and public accommodations will be of limited extent and duration so long as fundamental economic inequality along racial lines persist.

The scars of racism still remain deeply imbedded in America.

I do not know many Negroes who are eager to be “accepted” by white people, still less to be loved by them; they, the blacks, simply don’t wish to be beaten over the head by the whites every instant of our brief passage on the planet.

Segregation is a problem not just in my country but in every country.

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.

I couldn't adjust to the racism in Florida.

I think sports is one of the places where race plays itself out publicly. Although we pretend it doesn't.

The very first time I was on a car in Atlanta, I saw the conductor - all conductors are white - ask a Negro woman to get up and take a seat farther back in order to make a place for a white man. I have also seen white men requested to leave the Negro section of the car.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

I found there's a fairly blatant racism in America that's already there, and I don't think I noticed it when I lived here as a kid. But when I went back to South Africa, and then it's sort of thrust in your face, and then came back here - I just see it everywhere.

Friends, to me for years St. Louis represented a city of fear... humiliation... misery and terror... A city where in the eyes of the white man a Negro should know his place and had better stay in it.

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country; it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

Our party [Zanu-PF] must continue to strike fear in the heart of the white man, our real enemy!

What I did not yet know so intensely was the hatred of the white American for the black, a hatred so deep that I wonder if every white man in this country, when he plants a tree, doesn't see Negroes hanging from its branches.

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.