Segregated Society Quotes

My mother is white. My biological father is black. When my mother was 17, she got pregnant. They lived in Waterloo, Iowa, which at the time in 1971 was a very segregated society.

Also, of course, for most of this time most Americans thought of America as a white country with, at best, only a very segregated and subordinate role for blacks.

Most whites live, grow, play, learn, love, work and die primarily in social and geographic racial segregation. Yet, our society does not teach us to see this as a loss. Pause for a moment and consider the magnitude of this message: We lose nothing of value by having no cross-racial relationships.

When I was growing up in rural Alabama, as a young child, about 50 miles from Montgomery, and we would visit the little town of Troy, or visit Montgomery or Tuskegee, I would see the signs that said, "WHITE MEN - COLORED MEN," "WHITE WOMEN - COLORED WOMEN."And I would come home and say to my mother and father and my grandparents, "Why?" "Why this?" "Why that?" And they would just tell me, "That's just the way it is! Don't get in the way. Don't cause trouble."

In a place like Afghanistan where the society is completely segregated, women have access to women. Men cannot always photograph women and cannot get the access that I get.

We insist that educationally and socially we maintain a segregated society …

I came from a family that was pretty insularly Cherokee. We kept to ourselves - the white people were there, and we were here, and it was practically a segregated kind of thing.

For generations, our political life was distorted by the influence of public officials whose foremost goal was to preserve the essence, if not the form, of slavery in a segregated and discriminatory social system.

Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice.

I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever.