Separate But Equal Quotes

“As we drove down the highway and out of the Till country, we passed a large, well-kept graveyard. At one end of it there was a section in very bad condition, separated from the rest by a high iron fence. "That's the Negro section," Amzie remarked, "but I don't get excited about that. The graveyard is the only place where things can be separate ... and equal.”
― Bayard Rustin, Down the Line: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin

“White people might say "separate but equal," and black people might temporarily have to accept the label, but both knew that they were participating in a verbal hoax. Sooner or later the institution had to collapse from the weight of illusion language had been asked to serve.”
― Robert Hemenway

“[The Montgomery Bus Boycott] is not a drama with only one actor. More precisely it is the chronicle of 50,000 Negroes who took to heart the principles of nonviolence, who learned to fight for their rights with the weapon of love, and who in the process, acquired a new estimate of their own human worth.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

“I could never adjust to the separate waiting rooms, separate eating places, separate rest rooms, partly because the separate was always unequal, and partly because the very idea of separation did something to my sense of dignity and self-respect.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story