Jim Crow Era Quotes

I majored in Southern history in college, and much of my early work at my first job - as a staff writer at 'Memphis' magazine - focused on race relations.

I went to what is known as, and was at that time, too, Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. In fact, because of the lack of public school facilities, I began there. I began boarding school at the high school level; in fact, a year below the high school level.

Those labeled felons may be denied the right to vote, are automatically excluded from juries, and may be legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education, public benefits, much like their grandparents or great grandparents may have been discriminated against during the Jim Crow era.

During the Jim Crow era, poll taxes and literacy tests kept the African-Americans from polls. But today, felon disenfranchisement laws accomplished what poll taxes and literacy tests ultimately could not, because those laws were struck down. But felony disenfranchisement laws had been allowed to stand.

I thought about Emmett Till, and I could not go back. My legs and feet were not hurting, that is a stereotype. I paid the same fare as others, and I felt violated. I was not going back.

My style is not specific to the antebellum South, but it's heavily inspired by the Jim Crow era.

When you think of 244 years of slavery and 81 years of that finally you are going to be allowed to be part of the pool from which people choose jobs. That's not a substantive kind of move, but it was very important.

Way back about nineteen-twenty there was a Klan... The Ku Klux's gone... It'll never come back.

The time for running has come to an end. You tell them white folk in Mississippi that all the scared niggers are dead!

Many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again, once you've been branded a felon.

The South was very segregated. I mean, all through my childhood, long after Jim Crow was supposed to not be in existence, it was still a very segregated South.

The South is the region that history has happened to.

That conclusion is inescapable, given the well-established evidence that voter-ID laws don't disenfranchise minorities or reduce minority voting, and in many instances enhance it, despite claims to the contrary by Mr. Holder and his allies. As more states adopt such laws, the left has railed against them with increasing fury, even invoking the specter of the Jim Crow era to describe electoral safeguards common to most nations, including in the Third World.

I prefer the 1950s where people were like, "I'm a white supremacist, and that's who I am." Now people want to burn a cross on your lawn and call themselves not racists.

'Blacks were too scared to do anything, but they came out to greet James Meredith': That would have been the story in the evening news if I hadn't gotten myself shot. I got shot, and that allowed the movement protest thing to take over then and do their thing.