Racial Progress Quotes

Should a community... be free to enact legislation to say they don't want blacks? Now that's illegal. Fifty years ago it was legal. Is that progress or is that regress?

My grandmother lived to be 100 years old. Her grandmother was a slave, yet she was a college graduate in the Spellman class of 1917. She taught art for 50 years and she saved her Social Security checks for her children's education.

I bring the experiences of women. As a daughter, as a mother, as a wife, as a sister. That is who I am. Those experiences are part of me. And it is part of our American journey that we have moved through so much of what used to hold people back because of gender, because of race.

Think about it: we went into slavery pagans; we came out Christians. We went into slavery pieces of property; we came out American citizens. We went into slavery with chains clanking about our wrists; we came out with the American ballot in our hands.

In the hands of the Negro teacher rests the destiny of the race.

LBJ’s policies were giving American blacks hope they’d never had, they found intolerable what they had once accepted as inevitable.

What really exercises my mind is not this hypothetical day on which some other Negro ‘first’ will become the first Negro president. What I am really curious about is just what kind of country he’ll be President of.

The Talented Tenth is alive and well today and visible in all arenas of prominence. 'That they may guide the mass away from the contamination and death of the worst, in their own and other races.' As they elevate themselves from the masses, they ensure their success and that of their fellow Talented Tenth friends.

It may be quite true that some negroes are better than some white men; but no rational man, cognisant of the facts, believes that the average negro is the equal, still less the superior, of the average white man. And, if this be true, it is simply incredible that, when all his disabilities are removed, and our prognathous relative has a fair field and no favour, as well as no oppressor, he will be able to compete successfully with his bigger-brained and smaller-jawed rival, in a contest which is to be carried on by thoughts and not by bites.

We've come a long way from the days where there was state-enforced segregation. But we still have a way to go.

After Hitler was destroyed, there was the threat of Stalin, but it was always the world pressure that was upon America that enabled black people to go forward. It was not the initiative internally that the Negro put forth in America, nor was it a change of moral heart on the part of Uncle Sam it was world pressure.

[James] Baldwin said the real question is not when there will be the first Negro president in this country. The important question is what country he's going to be the president of.

Now, I've lived long enough to know that race relations are better than they were 10 or 20 or 30 years ago no matter what some folks say. You can see it not just in statistics, you see it in the attitudes of young Americans across the political spectrum. But we're not where we need to be. And all of us have more work to do.

The Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.

However, while we should certainly celebrate the demise of overt official racism, we must also critically examine where we are at this historical moment, recognize the many challenges ahead and reaffirm our commitment to making Brown v. Board a reality.

Spiritual experiences and their results are not meant for the individual. They are for the evolution of the whole race.

In my judgment, the slogan "black power" and what has been associated with it has set the civil rights movement back considerably in the United States over the period of the last several months.

People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.

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.

White Americans believe we've made more progress since the end of slavery in 1865 than do black Americans for whom '12 Years a Slave' documents a collective memory, passed down in the genes and by the lore of generations.

The biggest accomplishment, in racial terms, for Barack Obama was being elected. He had to overcome his blackness to be elected. He climbed the Mt. Everest of American politics, becoming an historic first.

Over the generations, black leaders have ranged from noble souls to shameless charlatans.

I don't buy the argument that there can't be a successful independent candidacy for the presidency of the United States. People who say, 'It can't happen,' are many of the same people who said we'd never elect an African American.

I was born in the 1960s. I came up in the 1970s. I know how race relations were. The thing is, I want to advance the ball and never return to those days again. I want to keep the topic going. I'm going to discuss it. And we're going to make America better. It's my job as a citizen, and I demand it.

When they kept you out it was because you were black; when they let you in, it is because you are black. That's progress?