School Segregation Quotes

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.

Many well-meaning intelligent people have argued since the May 17, 1954, decision of the United States Supreme Court outlawing segregation in the public schools that communication between the races has broken down.

Students of color who attended integrated schools in the decades immediately following Brown were more likely to graduate high school, go to college, earn higher wages, live healthier lifestyles, and not have a criminal record than their peers in segregated schools.

Students who spend their lives in segregated schools can look forward to a life on the margins.

Society continues to pay the bill for the school segregation that was a part of our history.

If an American, because his skin is dark, cannot eat lunch in a restaurant open to the public, if he cannot send his children to the best public school available, if he cannot vote for the public officials who represent him, if, in short, he cannot enjoy the full and free life which all of us want, then who among us would be content to have the color of his skin changed and stand in his place? Who among us would then be content with the counsels of patience and delay?

In the South the white men used to call all Black men “boy” until they got to be old enough to call them “uncle.” It was sex-the feat of sexual competition. When they used to get liquored up and talk they would always say, “The schoolroom leads to the bedroom” to justify school segregation.

If we sent our children to school, Abraham Lincoln would kick them out, in the name of Republicanism and anti-slavery.

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.

Segregation of schools is no accident.

Growing up in Augusta in such a protected and loving community is something that I really enjoy talking about. I love talking about - even though I grew up, of course, in the time of segregated schools: Brown vs. Board of Education came along after I was already in first grade.

Schoolbooks may not be interchanged between white and colored schools.

There was one public school for boys, and one for girls, but Jewish children were admitted in limited numbers - only ten to a hundred; and even the lucky ones had their troubles.

Have we become inoculated with prejudice of race that an American government professedly based on the principles of freedom ... can make distinctions between such citizens ... simply because of their respective races?

Our political establishment refuses to use the word 'segregated.' They call the schools diverse, which means half black, half Hispanic, and maybe two white kids and three Asians. 'Diverse' has become a synonym for 'segregated.'

We're now segregating our schools based on economics; we're segregating our schools based on where a child's parents live. And it has the same corrosive effect of destroying people's opportunity as racial segregation did.

Federal, state and municipal policies have isolated many children, especially in urban districts, into schools that are segregated by race, class and income.

Every day, I would show up, and there were no kids, just me and my teacher in my classroom. Every day, I would be escorted by marshals past a mob of people protesting and boycotting the school. This went on for a whole year.

This is the first indication I have ever had that there is a God.

Attacking school segregation requires all hands on deck. We in the charter sector must move beyond our traditional comfort zone, serving disadvantaged students, and meet the demands of parents who have other high quality options.

I don't see anything wrong with a neighborhood association wanting to keep their neighborhood a certain way or their apartment complex a certain way. I don't see anything wrong with white kids wanting to go to school with white children, or black kids wanting to go to school with black kids.

The promise of equal educational opportunity envisioned by the Brown decision remains unfulfilled.

I wasn't cocky, just confident; I went to an all black school, a white kid.

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.

I am not against Muslim schools. But as I believe in integration, I think we would be better off overall if we did not have denominational schools at all.