Desegregation Quotes

“If you want to make beautiful music,you must play the black note and the white notes together”
― Richard M. Nixon

“Narratives of racial exceptionality obscure the reality of ongoing institutional white control while reinforcing ideologies of individualism and meritocracy. They also do whites a disservice by obscuring the white allies behind the scenes who worked hard and long to open the field. These allies could serve as much-needed role models for other whites.”
― Robin DiAngelo, What Does It Mean to Be White?: Developing White Racial Literacy

“A segregated education in America is unacceptable,' he [John Lewis] said. 'Integration is, it still remains, the goal worth fighting for. You should be fighting for it. We should be fighting for it. It is something that is good unto itself, apart from all the other arguments that can be made. This nation needs to be a family, and a family sits down for its dinner at a table, and we all deserve a place together at that table. And our children deserve to have a place together in their schools and classrooms, and they need to have that opportunity while they're still children, while they're in those years of innocence.
'You cannot deviate from this. You have to say, Some things are good and right unto themselves,”
― Jonathan Kozol, The Shame of the Nation

“The Negro had been deeply disappointed over the slow pace of school desegregation. He knew that in 1954 the highest court in the land had handed down a decree calling for desegregation of schools "with all deliberate speed." He knew that this edict from the Supreme Court had been heeded with all deliberate delay. At the beginning of 1963, nine years after this historic decision, approximately 9 percent of southern Negro students were attending integrated schools. If this pace were maintained, it would be the year 2054 before integration in southern schools would be a reality.

In its wording the Supreme Court decision had revealed an awareness that attempts would be made to evade its intent. The phrase "all deliberate speed" did not mean that another century should be allowed to unfold before we released Negro children from the narrow pigeonhole of the segregated schools; it meant that, giving some courtesy and consideration to the need for softening old attitudes and outdated customs, democracy must press ahead, out of the past of ignorance and intolerance, and into the present of educational opportunity and moral freedom.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“Today Birmingham is by no means miraculously desegregated. There is still resistance and violence. The last-ditch struggle of a segregationist governor still soils the pages of current events and it is still necessary for a harried president to invoke his highest powers so that a Negro child may go to school with a white child in Birmingham. But these factors only serve to emphasize the truth that even the segregationists know: The system to which they have been committed lies on its deathbed. The only imponderable is the question of how costly they will make the funeral.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“I noticed (the ball) was multicolored. One side was green and the other was red. When we got to the gathering I held that ball up and I said, 'Before we begin, will you tell me what color this ball is?' They said, 'red.' I said, 'no, it's green.' We argued a while and I turned the ball around and said, 'tell me what you see here.'
Here's what we want to do. We want you to understand until you shall have seen how it looks to me on my side, you can't convince me that you know what you're talking about, because this ball is going to be red on this side and green on that side until the day it dies. Now, if I'm willing to come around here and see how it looks to you, and if you're willing to come around here and see how it looks to me, we can reconcile that.”
― Dudley Flood

“There was only one justification for the use of troops; to uphold the law. Though Faubus denied it, I, as President of the United States, now had that justification and the clear obligation to act ... the 101st Airborne Division, from nearby Fort Campbell, Kentucky, arrived in Little Rock; another five hundred moved in later the same day.”
― Dwight D. Eisenhower

“A Thought:

Can we stop showing Black and White pictures of the entire decade of the 1960s so people stop thinking it was 1000 years ago. I'm two years younger than the Civil Rights movement. And Ruby Bridges lives down the street from me and is on Instagram.

(8/1/2020 on Twitter)”
― Hannah Beachler

“Let's raise our children together: let them ride the same school buses, learn the same history, swing in the same playgrounds, pedal their bikes down the same streets, share their same city.

Then we shall see face to face. Halleluiah.”
― Richard Blanco, How to Love a Country

“The newspaper reporter summed up the rhetoric “on segregation all candidates agree, they support it….all five candidates tried to prove they were more racist than their opponents, a sprint to the bottom. All promising to take any measure to stop the most dangerous and immediate threat to the Mississippi way of life-which apparently was a black child who wanted to learn math. All of Hannibal’s elephants and Genghis Khan’s hordes lacked the world-destroying power of a bunch of first graders learning the alphabet and how to stay in line during the walk from recess to lunch”.”
― Wright Thompson, The Barn: The Secret History of a Murder in Mississippi