Segregation Quotes

“There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being "false," "untrue," yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction.”
― Clark Zlotchew

“All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They:
But if you cross over the sea,
Instead of over the way,
You may end by (think of it!) looking on We
As only a sort of They!”
― Rudyard Kipling, Debits And Credits

“When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.”
― Clark Zlotchew, Once upon a Decade: Tales of the Fifties

“UNDIVIDED

I am for
One world undivided.
One world without fear and corruption.
One world ruled by Truth and Justice.

I am for
One peaceful world for all,
Where hate has been overcome by love,
And everyone is guided only
By their conscience.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Music itself was color-blind but the media and the radio stations segregate it based on their perceptions of the artists.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

“So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat’s where Ah wuz’s s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So ah ast, ‘where is me? Ah don’t see me.’
… ‘Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!’
Den dey all laughed real hard. But before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like the rest.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times, just as she was cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness…Like the pecking order in a chicken yard… Once having set up her idols and built altars to them it was inevitable that she would worship there.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and the fountains, but the water itself.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Wild animals look good in the jungle, not in the Oval Office.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“It was against the law for a colored person and a white person to play checkers together in Birmingham. White and colored gamblers had to place their bets at separate windows and sit in separate aisles at racetracks in Arkansas. At saloons in Atlanta, the bars were segregated: Whites drank on stools at one end of the bar and blacks on stools at the other end, until the city outlawed even that, resulting in white-only and colored-only saloons. There were white parking spaces and colored parking spaces in the town square in Calhoun City, Mississippi. In one North Carolina courthouse, there was a white Bible and a black Bible to swear to tell the truth on.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“Tolerate no hate,
Moderate no help.
Segregate no shelf,
Alienate no sect.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Her father looked to the distance, out across the pond. “Sometimes I just get tired of bowin’ down and givin’ up, you know?”
It was Dr. Hawkins who nodded in agreement. He placed a hand on Papa’s broad shoulder, but then he added, “You know, Jonah, sometimes it’s best to wait till times get better.”
― Sharon M. Draper, Stella by Starlight

“The segregationist order was never stable. It was only the white southern myth of timeless tradition, a myth installed partly at gunpoint as an element of consolidation of ruling class power, that gave it the appearance of solidity. Retracing that history, which contained and shaped but generally lies beyond the insight that can be drawn from personal experience, is necessary to fill in the picture of what the Jim Crow South was. However, because of the ways the past lives imagistically so near the surface of the present in the South, moments occasionally erupt that encourage, perhaps demand, critical reflection on the region's actual history and that history's relation to social and political life today.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“For reasons that have less to do with an abstraction like white supremacy than with the dynamics of a political and economic regime that concentrates benefits at the top at the expense of everyone else, black New Orleanians are disproportionately–but by no means exclusively–likely to occupy the ranks of the dispossessed under that regime. And the terms on which the white supremacist past has been acknowledged and repudiated actually obscure the sources of inequality and dispossession today.

While the segregationist system was clearly and obviously racist and white supremacist, it wasn't merely about white supremacy for its own sake alone. It was the instrument of a specific order of political and economic power that was clearly racial but that most fundamentally stabilized and reinforced the dominance of powerful political and economic interests. White supremacy was and remains an ideology, and a very abstract one at that, and because it's so abstract–its basic premises and categories are fantasies–its practical warrants are always improvised.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“What seem to be vestiges of the Jim Crow world in a sense are just that. But passage of the old order's segregationist trappings throws into relief the deeper reality that what appeared and was experienced as racial hierarchy was also class hierarchy. Now blacks occupy positions in the socioeconomic order previously available only to whites, and whites occupy those previously identified with blacks. And the dynamics of superordination and subordination, patterns of appropriation and distribution, and dominant understandings of which material interests should drive policy remain much as they were.

This underscores the point that the core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology. Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests. At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it. That is the source of that bizarre sensation I felt in the region a generation after the defeat of Jim Crow. The larger takeaway from this reality is that a simple racism/anti-racism framework isn't adequate for making sense of the segregation era, and it certainly isn't up to the task of interpreting what has succeeded it or challenging the forms of inequality and injustice that persist.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“It is bemusing to observe when formative periods of one's past become grist for scholarly, ideological, and casual interpretation and debate and are constructed and reconstructed from the standpoint of current concerns and debates. That's also inevitable, on one level what history is. A danger, however, is that, when reckoning with the past becomes too much like an allegory, its nuances and contingencies, its essential open-endedness, can disappear. Then history can become either a narrative of inevitable, progressive unfolding to the present or, worse, a tendentious assertion that nothing has ever changed, and both divesting the past of its discrete foreignness and contingency or reducing it to the warm-up act for the present are handmaidens of ruling class power. The danger of that tendency is especially great in moments of ruling class triumphalism such as this one.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“Awake, Arise, Integrate - to segregate is to disintegrate!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Little Planet on The Prairie: Dunya Benim, Sorumluluk Benim

“We went from banning certain kinds of people from our communities to banning the kinds of housing in which those people lived - namely, apartment buildings designed for multiple families - achieving the same ends.”
― Matthew Desmond, Poverty, by America

“The men are drunk on self-righteousness and that shallow adolescent confidence of knowing who you are because you have ostracized who you are not.”
― Erica Berry, Wolfish: The stories we tell about fear, ferocity and freedom

“Liberty is important and that is why forced segregation was wrong, but forced integration is also wrong, so apartheid was wrong because it forces segregation, and equity is wrong because it forces integration; both of them are wrong.”
― Wanjiru Njoya

“Cosmos is colored.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“Here at the mountaintop, we're just humans - no black, no white, no believer, nonbeliever - here at the mountaintop, we're each other's keeper.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Iftar-e Insaniyat: The First Supper

“In our modern urban civilization, multitudes of our people have been condemned to urban anonymity — to living the kind of life where many of them neither know nor care about their own neighbors. They find themselves isolated from the life of their community and their nation, driven by social forces beyond their control into little individual worlds in which their own individual objectives have become paramount to the collective good. Social objectives, social welfare, the good of the nation, the democratic way of life — all these have become nebulous, meaningless, sterile phrases.

This course of urban anonymity, of individual divorce from the general social life, erodes the foundations of democracy. For although we profess to be citizens of a democracy, and although we may vote once every four years, millions of our people feel deep down in their heart of hearts that there is no place for them that they do not “count.” They have no voice of their own, no organization (really their own instead of absentee) to represent them, no way in which they may lay their hand or their heart to the shaping of their own destinies.”
― Saul D. Alinsky, Reveille for Radicals

“In a segregated world human identities cancel each other, in an integrated world human identities enhance each other.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Hawkins and the U.S. government knew that the concept of private property must take hold. They knew that communalism among the Creeks provided strength, but you can divide and conquer a nation more easily with private property if you pit family estate against family estate.”
― Caleb Gayle, We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power

“The atheist and the believer drink from the same water, breathe the same air, eat the same food – mother nature, the actual origin of life, doesn’t segregate between believer and nonbeliever, it’s only the savages who do that.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Unaccountably he felt at home here among these black folk. Their jests, scraps of conversation and lusty laughter all seemed like heavenly music. Momentarily he felt a disposition to stay among them, to share again their troubles which they seemed always to bear with a lightness that was yet not indifference. But then, he suddenly realized with just a tiny trace of remorse that the past was forever gone. He must seek other pastures, other pursuits, other playmates, other loves. He was white now.”
― George S. Schuyler, Black No More

“. . . .glorious to expel from the continent, that barbarous and hellish power, which hath stirred up the Indians and Negroes to destroy us ; The cruelty hath a double guilt, it is dealing brutally by us, and treacherously by them.”
― Thomas Paine