Top 36 Isabel Wilkerson Quotes
#1. The two endorsements I'm most proud of come from Isabel Wilkerson and Toni Morrison. The latter is the greatest American fiction writer of our time, and the former is on her way to being the greatest American nonfiction writer of our time.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#2. Isabel Wilkerson's book is a masterful narrative of the rich wisdom and deep courage of a great people. Don't miss it!
Cornel West
#3. From Louisiana, he followed the hyphens in the road that blurred together toward a faraway place, bridging unrelated things as hyphens do.
Isabel Wilkerson
#4. What I love about the stories of the Great Migration is that this is not ancient history; this is living history. Most people of color can find someone in their own family who had experienced a migration of some kind, knowing the sense of dislocation, longing and fortitude.
Isabel Wilkerson
#5. They speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement ...
Isabel Wilkerson
#6. It would take more than fifteen years before most of the South conceded to the Brown ruling and then only under additional court orders.
Isabel Wilkerson
#7. Dozens of school districts forwent federal funding rather than integrate their schools.
Isabel Wilkerson
#8. The general laws of migration hold that the greater the obstacles and the farther the distance traveled, the more ambitious the migrants.
Isabel Wilkerson
#9. They did what human beings looking for freedom, throughout history, have often done. They left.
Isabel Wilkerson
#10. America is made up of people who came from someplace else. Even the Native Americans came over the Bering strait ... America is what it is because people came from someplace else.
Isabel Wilkerson
#11. Now, we ain't got nothing to do with God's business, she says, sitting back in her seat. She adjusts herself and straightens her scarf, contenting herself with whatever the day has in store.
Isabel Wilkerson
#12. It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.
Isabel Wilkerson
#14. My parents absolutely did not think of themselves as part of the Great Migration. They knew they were part of a great wave. No one really talked about it in those terms or gave it a name.
Isabel Wilkerson
#15. Sometimes in some places they would actually stop the train - keep the train from stopping at a particular station because they saw that there were so many black people there waiting to board and so therefore those people wouldn't get to leave.
Isabel Wilkerson
#16. The story describes an incident during the trial of a black schoolteacher accused of disposing of a mule on which there was a mortgage. A defense witness, who was colored but looked white, took the stand and was being sworn in when the judge told the sheriff the man had been given the wrong Bible.
Isabel Wilkerson
#17. It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.
Isabel Wilkerson
#18. The South began acting in outright defiance of the Fourteenth Amendment of 1868, which granted the right to due process and equal protection to anyone born in the United States, and it ignored the Fifteenth Amendment of 1880, which guaranteed all men the right to vote.
Isabel Wilkerson
#19. The suburbanization and the ghettos that were created as a result of the limits of where [African-Americans] could live in the North [still exist today.] And ... the South was forced to change, in part because they were losing such a large part of their workforce through the Great Migration.
Isabel Wilkerson
#20. Miles Davis, his parents migrated from Arkansas to Illinois, where he had the luxury of being able to practice for hours upon hours. He never would have been able to do that in the cotton country of Arkansas.
Isabel Wilkerson
#21. That night, as he bounded up the steps and out of the church basement, nobody in the room could have imagined that they had just seen the man who, a decade from now, would become the first black president of the United States. NEW
Isabel Wilkerson
#22. Many immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn't want to talk about it because there had been pain and heartbreak under the caste system of the South. They didn't want to burden their children with what they had endured.
Isabel Wilkerson
#23. Still it made no sense to Pershing that one set of people could be in a cage, and the people outside couldn't see the bars.
Isabel Wilkerson
#24. Anything that could be conceived of that would separate black people from white people was devised and codified by someone in some state in the South. There were colored and White waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor's offices to the bus stations, as people may already know.
Isabel Wilkerson
#25. You must leave this world a better place than it would have been if you had not existed.
Isabel Wilkerson
#26. The measure of a man's estimate of your strength," he finally told them, "is the kind of weapons he feels that he must use in order to hold you fast in a prescribed place.
Isabel Wilkerson
#27. because of a chemical in his skin that some people resented and felt superior to and that no one on this earth could change.
Isabel Wilkerson
#28. As the distance of migration increases," wrote the migration scholar Everett Lee, "the migrants become an increasingly superior group.
Isabel Wilkerson
#29. County supervisors relented only after losing their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing finally to reopen the schools rather than face imprisonment.
Isabel Wilkerson
#30. That's why I preach today. Do not do spite," he said. "Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object that you aim and comes back and zaps you. And you're the one who pays for it.
Isabel Wilkerson
#32. The state funneled money to private academies for white students.
Isabel Wilkerson
#33. Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are products of the great migration. It's that massive. Many of us owe our very existence to the fact that people migrated.
Isabel Wilkerson
#34. [The Great Migration] had such an effect on almost every aspect of our lives - from the music that we listen to to the politics of our country to the ways the cities even look and feel.
Isabel Wilkerson
#35. Many migrants did not recognize the signs of trouble when they surfaced and so could not inoculate their children against them or intercede effectively when the outside world seeped into their lives. George
Isabel Wilkerson
#36. She has big searching eyes that see the good in people despite the evil she has seen, and she has a comforting kind of eternal beauty, her skin like the folds of a velvet shawl. Her
Isabel Wilkerson
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