Juan Williams > Quotes

“The Tea Party is a fitting representation of our era of no-debate, politically correct politics, where each political side has its own media, and opposing views are almost never given a fair hearing. Conservatives listen only to conservatives, and liberals listen only to liberals. People are spared the inconvenience of facts that don’t fit their beliefs and the unpleasantness of seriously considering a point of view other than their own.”
― Juan Williams, Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate

“I was born into a segregated system, and I took it for granted. Nobody told me any different. It really wasn’t until I got to Washington that I began to realize how much at variance the South was from the rest of the country and how very wrong the system was. So when I came back to Montgomery, in 1951, after almost twenty years, I no longer took the system for granted.”
― Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965

“what I call the soft bigotry of low expectations.”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It

“Then we all run out and are outraged [saying], ‘The cops shouldn’t have shot him.’ What”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It

“In 1940 the out-of-wedlock birth rate for blacks was 19 percent. Today it is close to 70 percent.”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It

“the Democratic Party, and decades of Democratic control of Congress, the schools have continued to fail minority children? Big-city schools have become increasingly segregated by race and class in the last thirty years. Their academic performance has declined. In addition, the black middle class has joined whites in moving out to the suburbs to get their children away from those schools.”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It

“the strong focus on self-determination has faded, at the moment when its impact could have been the most powerful. In its place is a tired rant by civil rights leaders about the power of white people—what white people have done wrong, what white people didn’t do, and what white people should do. This rant puts black people in the role of hapless victims waiting for only one thing—white guilt to bail them out.”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It

“put back in their place.”
― Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965

“Black leaders of all ideological stripes agreed that the key to racial progress was black people helping themselves. King, for example, said he wanted above all else to get black people to shed the idea that they did not control their destiny, an idea he attributed to the power of racists to infect black people with self-defeating doubts about inferiority and create a psychological need”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It

“The newspaper claimed that Sharpton had worked privately for the FBI after he had been videotaped in 1983 apparently asking about buying cocaine from an undercover FBI agent. As recently as 2005, Sharpton took money from a company called LoanMax in exchange for appearing in ads designed to lure poor black people into their financial web. The company offered to loan money at high interest rates to poor people with bad credit histories if they agreed to put up the titles to their cars as collateral.”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It

“Morgan compared the movement to Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle against the British in India.”
― Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965

“Closer to the idea of reparations for slavery, the Florida legislature has paid $150,000 to eight black people, the only living survivors of white racist attacks in 1923 that left twenty-six black people dead in the small black community of Rosewood. The legislature also provided $500,000 to compensate African American families who lost property during the attacks on black homes, churches, and businesses.”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It

“King’s first uses of the nonviolent method were based more on the Bible and Christian pacifism than on the teachings of the Mahatma. As both sides of the boycott dug in for what looked like a protracted battle, King preached the importance of meeting hate with love. For the struggle to be successful, the movement needed to win the support of morally decent and compassionate people. In the face of threats, being fired from work, or even being beaten, to react with violence would undermine the righteousness of the cause.”
― Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965

“It was the first time in the history of Mississippi that a Negro had stood in court and pointed his finger at a white man as a killer of a Negro,” said Michigan congressman Charles Diggs, who attended the trial.”
― Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965

“the experience taught me a lesson … even when we asked for justice within the segregation laws, the ‘powers that be’ were not willing to grant it. Justice and equality, I saw, would never come while segregation remained, because the basic purpose of segregation was to perpetuate injustice and inequity.”
― Juan Williams, Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years, 1954-1965

“I used to have a lot of fights with Martin about his theory about disobeying the law,” Marshall said in an interview years later. “I didn’t believe in that. I thought you did have a right to disobey the law, and you also had a right to go to jail for it, and he kept talking about Henry David Thoreau, and I told him that Thoreau wrote his book [“Civil Disobedience”] in jail. If you want to write a book, you go to jail and write it.”
― Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary

“At some point, people have to take a personal accounting, turn away from any self-defeating behavior, and be sure they are doing everything in their power to put their families and their communities in a position to prosper and advance.”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It

“Both the left wing and the right wing are heavily invested in the fight over what it means to be “politically correct.” That is because the winner of that fight earns the right to decide the vocabulary of acceptable terms and labels. It allows one side or the other to own the debate, control the airwaves, and stir a base of funders and grassroots fans. This fight is the backdrop to nearly every debate in America today. As for the middle ground, it is shunned as a kind of no-man’s-land.”
― Juan Williams, Muzzled: The Assault on Honest Debate

“It does away with a lot of complaints that ‘We Were Also Done Wrong,’ from the Irish or other minorities, precisely because it recognizes the fundamental difference. African Americans were kept down by the force of law, not custom, and then every effort to lift the burden of the law was met with denial of due process.”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It

“Marshall’s resolve to use sociological studies in the schools cases was rooted in his life experience—as the son of a bright man who never got an education and never became more than a waiter. Marshall saw the same trap still catching many young black people. They were defeated at a young age by limits they accepted about their talents and their right to an education.”
― Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary

“Not one civil rights group took up Cosby’s call for marches and protests against drug dealers, pregnant teens, deadbeat dads, and hate-filled rap music that celebrates violence.”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It

“Reparations, on the other hand, require black Americans to embrace a self-image of weakness and take on the cloak of a broken people.”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It

“Hooray,” Cosby said, spitting it out bitterly. “Anybody see any sense in this? Systemic racism, they [black leaders] call it.” Then Cosby pointed out the obvious issue—but one that the black civil rights leadership somehow missed or for some reason underplayed. Black leaders, he declared, should tell poor black people to stop smoking crack.”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It

“When Marshall spoke to NAACP youth groups and asked the youngsters what they were going to do when they grew up, the kids answered: “I’m going to be a good butler” or “I hope I might be able to get in the post office.” He thought to himself, That was it for them. He understood he was watching their lives get shut down before they were even grown up. He wanted to unravel this rope that was choking so many.2 Marshall saw the crippling insecurity among those black children as a legal issue.”
― Juan Williams, Thurgood Marshall: American Revolutionary

“To finance his failing campaign, he reportedly took about $200,000 from a Republican political strategist known for playing dirty politics, Roger Stone.”
― Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America and What We Can Do About It