Stacey

“The disparity in pay, reported without apology in the local papers for all to see, would have far-reaching effects. It would mean that even the most promising of colored people, having received next to nothing in material assets from their slave foreparents, had to labor with the knowledge that they were now being underpaid by more than half, that they were so behind it would be all but impossible to accumulate the assets their white counterparts could, and that they would, by definition, have less to leave succeeding generations than similar white families. Multiplied over the generations, it would mean a wealth deficit between the races”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“The migration streams were so predictable that by the end of the Migration, and, to a lesser degree, even now, one can tell where a black northerner’s family was from just by the city the person grew up in—a good portion of blacks in Detroit, for instance, having roots in Tennessee, Alabama, western Georgia, or the Florida panhandle because the historic rail lines connected those places during the Migration years.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“They lived in big cities too distracted to care what the colored people did as long as they did it to themselves, and that was the greatest blessing of all.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“Living long is a gift denied to many, and so it comes with a responsibility to make the most of it. At very least to appreciate it. People gripe about growing older—their aches and pains, how much harder everything is—as if they had forgotten that the alternative is dying young.”
― Catherine Ryan Hyde, Have You Seen Luis Velez?