School Integration Quotes

These Southerners are not bad men. They just want to be sure that their daughters will not have to go to school and sit next to a big Negro.

When I grew up in Cincinnati in 1974, the Board of Education set up the performing school, similar to the New York performing arts school, and it was in walking distance from my school.

Our schools are more segregated today than they have ever been since 1968. The schools that I visit hardly have any white students…. Schools that had desegregated, are now resegregating.

In the early 1970s in Atlanta, I attended what had formerly been an all-white school but had become a black school after integration and white flight. Perhaps because of this, the teachers created a curriculum that included a focus on African American literature and history year-round, not just in February.

School integration did not come to be the day after the Brown ruling was issued. Progress took years, and it took passion, strength, and courage from a large group of committed individuals.

Blood will run in the streets if Negro pupils should attempt to enter Central High School.

It's really important to say this. Often the faith schools were founded before the state provided education. I want good education in this country so I'm not going to slag off faith schools. I think that it's important that people of different backgrounds and different faiths go to school together and many faith schools do that.

I think in some cases busing did improve the situation in some areas; in some cases it didn't. We had busing in St. Louis, and it has been ended and we are using other methods of trying to better integrate the schools.

I grew up in the era of the desegregation program. I actually got bussed to a predominately white high school. I didn't have a choice.

The Problem We All Live With

There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools and she was bused to school every day. That little girl was me.

I am opposed to busing for the purpose of achieving racial balance in our schools.

I couldn't go to school with whites. Now there are schools that educate everyone.

I believe, the NAACP began to try to organize parents of Negro children to file petitions with the boards of education regarding the integration of the school system. You had some very severe economic reprisals against people in Mississippi and in South Carolina. So, in order to try to help to meet some of the physical needs and the economic needs of people in Clarendon County [SC] who had been displaced from the land, and otherwise, and in certain sections of Mississippi, we organized in New York City something called "In Friendship".

Around 1969, my family had just bought a house in a lower-middle-class white neighborhood two blocks away from school. Then, all of a sudden, all the white people left the neighborhood and the school.

It dates back to my dad and my uncles. They all got permits to go to Beverly Hills High School back in the '70s and early '80s. After they finished college, they came back and became football coaches there. So I was there with a permit.

If we could create higher education from scratch, would we have organizations that divide people by race, class and gender at institutions that are supposed to be encouraging diversity? No!

In 1974, when the city of Boston was desegregating its schools, I watched the news with my dad and saw the police escorts in riot gear, the protesters screaming at the buses, small frightened faces in their windows.

The NAACP was even considering earlier this summer reassessing their position on school integration.

I know that there is an objection to the association of colored children with white children in the same schools. This prejudice exists in my own State. It would be impossible to carry a proposition to educate the few colored children that now live in that State in the same school houses with white children.

Desegregation came very painfully to the Boston schools, long after John Kelly finished high school, and the pain of desegregating Boston schools was visited entirely on the students who looked like Frederica Wilson.

The decision requires the adjustment of men’s minds and actions to the unfamiliar and unpleasant.

Sure, integrating schools may sound benign. But whats the use of living in a gated community if my kids go to school and get poor all over them?

The 1957 crisis in Little Rock, brought about by the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, was a huge part of the march toward freedom and opportunity in America.

Racial discrimination in public education is unconstitutional.....All provisions of federal, state or local law requiring or permitting such discrimination must yield to this principle.