Urban Unrest Quotes

The mobs of great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body.

… white racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture (of private discrimination and segregation) that has been accumulating in our cities since the end of World War II.

So that the failures to pass a civil rights bill isn't because of Black Power, isn't because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; it's not because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities.

The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America, and he will say that government welfare programs were designed to attract large numbers of blacks to the cities, where they would foment a vicious race war... .

We could get more action in the South because the Negroes had a feeling that they were being oppressed. But you take New York, for example: they'd give Negroes little five-cent jobs here and there - and they thought they had something. And the same in Chicago and any of the metropolitan areas.

Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are almost part of London's texture.

I fought in Detroit 23 times.

I remember when Martin Luther King was assassinated and riots broke out in the city. We celebrated Palm Sunday on 14th Street. I have a memory of walking down the street with buildings smoldering, and soldiers and cops everywhere. Anyways, it [St. Stephen’s] was a church that really taught me the things I needed to learn to not go to church. But I think it is a church that does great work, I went to a wedding there three days ago.

The mobs of the great cities add just so much to the support of pure government as sores do to the strength of the human body. It is the manners and spirit of a people which preserve a republic in vigor. A degeneracy in these is a canker which soon eats to the heart of its laws and constitution.

I know Chicago cops. They're tough. They have to be. The whole city would explode. It's like a bomb, Chicago.

Who can sit back as our towns and cities are torn apart by violence and be content with the status quo?

We have this exploding prison population. We have the equivalent of martial law on a day-to-day, 24/7-hour basis in our cities, because we have not heard the cry for help by young people in 1967.

Tensions and violence in cities across America are reminders of how quickly communities can erupt with an absence of social trust.

Congressman John Lewis should finally focus on the burning and crime infested inner-cities of the U.S. I can use all the help I can get!

America will continue paying a high price in civil and ethnic unrest unless the nation commits itself to help the urban poor lead productive and respectable lives.

[On urban unrest:] The only way to get respect is to be willing to use violence.

We are sitting on many powder kegs. Whether it's Ferguson, or St Louis, or like the other night, or Baltimore. Or different parts of Chicago.

When I ask OGs why there's so much division in the streets, nobody never really knows. But you know one thing that everybody always mention? A woman.

No one wants to see self-destructive riots because there's no future in riots.

Big cities do evoke a sense of menace.

In a summer marked by instability in the Middle East and Eastern Europe, I know the world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri - where a young man was killed, and a community was divided. So yes, we have our own racial and ethnic tensions.

The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that's least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.

The violence in New Orleans is erupting and it's continuing to grow at an alarming rate.

I'm not a regionalist. Both places have their pros and cons. And the cultural differences are slighter than they are made out to be. L.A. riots, N.Y. shops. Both are good for stress relief.