Top 66 Segregation Quotes

The tragedy of the civil rights movement is that just as it achieved the beginning of the end of racial segregation, white educated elites became swept up in the glamour of the sexual revolution.

You should concentrate on the segregation of waste, especially kitchen waste. Only after segregation the waste becomes useful and it can be recycled.

This whole segregation between famous people and other people is complete rubbish.

Segregation in the South is honest, open and aboveboard. Of the two systems, or styles of segregation, the Northern and the Southern, there is no doubt whatever in my mind which is the better.

The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith. We saw ourselves doing the work of the Almighty. Segregation and racial discrimination were not in keeping with our faith, so we had to do something.

Historically, mass demonstrations have worked best at shifting public opinion and pressuring the powers-that-be when organizers highlighted one concrete demand: ‘Bring Our Boys Home from Vietnam’; ‘End Segregation Now’; ‘Support Women’s Right to Choose.’

In England, more than in any comparable country, those who are born poor are more likely to stay poor, and those who inherit privilege are more likely to pass on privilege. For those of us who believe in social justice, this stratification and segregation are morally indefensible.

When I was growing up, our nation was partitioned: Blacks were segregated by law in the South and largely by custom in the North, though it, too, had segregation laws. Our best universities had quota systems. Many white communities had real estate covenants to keep nonwhites out.

Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.

I think people from Northern Ireland have some kind of unspoken general feeling of what it is to be around segregation. You have an awareness of it because you know how much grief it’s caused.

We have always policed the bodies of people of color, and black people in particular. The Jim Crow South is a classic example. White flight in the North. School segregation. Gerrymandering.

That white uniform was her ‘pass’ to get into white places with us – the grocery store, the state fair, the movies. Even though this was the 70s and the segregation laws had changed, the ‘rules’ had not.

Jim Crow segregation was bipartisan. The refusal of women suffrage was bipartisan. The denial of the basic dignity of members of the LGBTQ community has long been bipartisan. The Three-Fifths Compromise was the creation of a punitive national unity at the expense of black people’s basic humanity.

While housing discrimination and segregation in 2005 still affect millions of people, that’s not the way it has to be. Some things can change and should.

The March on Washington affirmed our values as a people: equality and opportunity for all. Forty-one years ago, during a time of segregation, these were an ideal.

An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there’s no longer segregation in America’s schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true.

Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.

Look at liberty’s greatest historic advances: ending slavery. Giving women the vote. Outlawing legal segregation. Each and every time, the people at the forefront of advancing those reforms – often putting their lives on the line – called themselves liberals.

Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any.

Denying that race matters is irrational in the face of segregation and all of the other forms of obvious racial inequity in society… Maintaining this denial of reality takes tremendous emotional and psychic energy.

I find the aristocratic parts of London so unattractive and angular; the architecture is so white and gated. But in New York, it’s different – even uptown it’s really grand, and there’s no real segregation there. It’s all mixed up.

There shouldn’t be a segregation of women over a size 16, it should just be all women who want to wear beautiful clothes.

We’re now segregating our schools based on economics; we’re segregating our schools based on where a child’s parents live. And it has the same corrosive effect of destroying people’s opportunity as racial segregation did.

My parents told me in the very beginning as a young child when I raised the question about segregation and racial discrimination, they told me not to get in the way, not to get in trouble, not to make any noise.

A lot of times, when you have a story of minorities in America, it’s always this super, oppositional thing. It’s segregation, it’s the racism, and those are the hard facts of the story.

It’s good that segregation is over.

My daddy thought – no, he expected – that my brothers and I and our generation would make the world a better place. He was correct in his belief because he had lived in an America of continual social progress, depression followed by prosperity, segregation by integration, and so on.

The stage is the last bastion of segregation.

Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, why don’t the adults around here just say something? Say it so they know we don’t accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there’s no easy way to get it. You can’t sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, ‘This is not right.’

Most new prison construction has occurred in predominately white, rural communities, and thus a new and bizarre form of segregation has emerged in recent years. Ghetto youth are transferred from their decrepit, underfunded, racially segregated schools to brand-new high-tech prisons located in white rural counties.

In today’s world, access to the Internet is inarguably critical to function in informal and formal spaces – and the costs to digital segregation are rising.

During the days of segregation, there was not a place of higher learning for African Americans. They were simply not welcome in many of the traditional schools. And from this backward policy grew the network of historical black colleges and universities.

Segregation was a burden for many blacks, because the end of the civil war and the amendments added to the constitution elevated expectations beyond reality in some respects.

Slavery was legal. Japanese interment was legal in this country. Segregation was legal.

I wanted to be a part of telling women there is no segregation. There is no need to ever not feel beautiful or glamorous. There should be nothing that gets in your way.

I come up in a segregated 1943 atmosphere of segregation.

I still remember, at the age of 12, learning that segregation had been permitted only a couple of decades before I was born and that a woman’s right to vote was not even a century old. But it was great Americans who stood up, some dying for the cause, to make our country better.

Segregation never brought anyone anything except trouble.

I think segregation is bad, I think it’s wrong, it’s immoral. I’d fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don’t need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that.

We should not forget that in the ’60s, George Wallace’s motto was ‘segregation forever,’ and that he did nothing to deter bombings and other acts of violence and, by his actions, condoned them.

We have a locale-based education system; we have increasing economic segregation. We clearly need a larger federal program to try to help disadvantaged districts.

Segregation, in a sense, helped create and maintain black solidarity.

One of the most interesting social trends of the past 20 years is the rise of residential segregation. So rich are living with rich and poor are living with poor.

We didn’t have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free.

We do not show the Negro how to overcome segregation, but we teach him how to accept it as final and just.

We still have many neighborhoods that are racially identified. We still have many schools that even though the days of state-enforced segregation are gone, segregation because of geographical boundaries remains.

When I think about our HBCUs, I think of icons like my mentor Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina State graduate, who fought against discrimination and segregation, and continues to champion for civil rights and equality.

I didn’t actually realise what apartheid meant. I’m probably a bit naive, but I thought it was more of a vague segregation, like on the beaches and buses.

I never knew about racial segregation until Martin Luther King.

There’s a lot of bad consequences that flow from segregation. The kids don’t do as well. We live separately. We don’t learn about each other. We’re all Americans. And yet, we separate based on, basically, race. And I believe it’s got to stop.

Segregation has never been a shadowy, impossible-to-pin-down conspiracy. It’s been an American way of life.