Top 100 Quotes About Segregation
#1. 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.
Maggie Gallagher
#2. In the days of segregation, when blacks were limited to certain neighborhoods, you could look around the black community and identify who the leaders were.
Roger Wilkins
#3. 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.
Leonard Boswell
#4. People of my generation knew we needed to move beyond that, the racial division and segregation and unsustainable social relations, that were unfair to millions of people. But it didn't mean that we were going to become a big government liberal.
Jeff Sessions
#5. Racial segregation in the South not only separated the races, but it separated the South from the rest of the country.
Robert Dallek
#6. [O]ur revolt was as much against the traditional black leadership structure as it was against segregation and discrimination.
John Lewis
#8. Everybody has the right to marry the person they love and be represented as a couple and family ... It's something that people will look back on in years to come and say, 'I can't believe it took so long for us to recognize this.' It'll be like segregation and giving women the right to vote.
Julianne Moore
#9. The Republican Party, in many ways, grew up as a reaction to that [ segregation], and a lot of people have misunderstood that.
Jeff Sessions
#10. Exploitation of the Negro through economic restriction and segregation the present system is sound and will doubtless continue until this gives place to the saner policy of actual interracial cooperation
not the present farce of racial manipulation in which the Negro is a figurehead.
Carter G. Woodson
#11. Discrimination and segregation are evidence of lower intelligence.
Erik Martin Willen
#12. I have known Trent Lott for 20 years, ... I don't believe he's racist. But he must proactively send a message to his colleagues in the Senate and the American people that he is absolutely opposed to any segregation in any form and racism in any form and discrimination in any form.
John McCain
#13. As long as you continue to tar social democracy with all the crimes of communism, I feel equally entitled to tar the free market with the crimes of slavery, segregation, colonialism and genocide; piss me off and I'll add fascism and the Nazis.
Greg Erwin
#14. New Testament Christians were most known by their love for their neighbors, but today we are most known for our segregation of the lowly.
Jefferson Bethke
#15. In many ways, history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.
Jesse Jackson
#16. I feel that segregation is totally unchristian, and that it is against everything the Christian religion stands for.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#17. We do not show the Negro how to overcome segregation, but we teach him how to accept it as final and just.
Carter G. Woodson
#18. 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.
Michael Gove
#19. When you live under the power of terror and segregation, you can't ever start a work of art.
Jeanne Moreau
#20. 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.
Wynton Marsalis
#21. Racial segregation has come back to public education with a vengeance.
Jonathan Kozol
#22. I've always tried to be what I call militantly nonviolent. I don't believe that anyone could seriously accuse me of not being totally committed to the breakdown of segregation.
Martin Luther King Jr.
#23. As a matter of history, the Fourteenth Amendment was not understood to ban segregation on the basis of race.
Cass Sunstein
#24. Chicago has very few public spaces where people are encouraged to get together. It's partly to prevent riots, and also to segregate a city with a history of racial segregation.
Aleksandar Hemon
#25. I just want to be really clear about this: Anyone who has read Colin Powell's biography - there's an entire section where he talks about experiencing segregation. Colin Powell did not appear when he became head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's not how it happened.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
#26. Louis Brandeis never had the opportunity - or he never sought the opportunity I should say - to work closely with African American lawyers. He was also a Southern Democrat, you know, at a time when both parties were supportive of segregation.
Jeffrey Rosen
#27. The new architecture and urban design of segregation could be called Calvinist: they reflect a desire to live in a world of predestination rather than chance, to strip the world of its wide-open possibilities and replace them with freedom of choice in the marketplace.
Rebecca Solnit
#28. 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.
Imogen Poots
#29. We know that segregation is evil. We know that the sickest children should not go to the worst hospitals. No, I refuse to pretend the problem is insufficient knowledge. We lack the theological will to do it.
Jonathan Kozol
#30. Only time, education and plenty of good schooling will make anti-segregation work.
Nat King Cole
#31. I grew up in the South. I grew up in the days of legalized segregation. And, so, whether you called it legal racial segregation or you called it apartheid, it was the same injustice.
Johnnetta B. Cole
#32. This whole segregation between famous people and other people is complete rubbish.
Maisie Williams
#33. We demand that segregation be ended in every school district in the year 1963! We demand that we have effective civil rights legislation - no compromise, no filibuster - and that include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, FEPC and the right to vote.
Bayard Rustin
#34. For me, the real earth is that chosen part of the universe, still almost universally dispersed and in course of gradual segregation, but which is little by little taking on body and form in Christ.
Pierre Teilhard De Chardin
#35. You have to be a whole, dignified, self-respecting person in order to be an English teacher or whatever kind of job your education would prepare you for, and I just knew that segregation was wrong, and I knew that I should not be going along with it. That I should resist it.
Diane Nash
#36. 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.
Bruce Hornsby
#37. I have never been what you would call just an integrationist. I know I've been called that ... Integrating that bus wouldn't mean more equality. Even when there was segregation, there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us.
Rosa Parks
#38. We shouldn't let the Republicans off the hook. Theodore Roosevelt, we learned from Jeff Cowan's new book, was just as bad as certainly [Louis] Brandeis was, or many Democrats were on the question of segregation.
Jeffrey Rosen
#39. A man I admire and respect - Congressman John Lewis, an American hero, made allegations that Sarah Palin and I were somehow associated with the worst chapter in American history, segregation, deaths of children in church bombings, George Wallace. That, to me, was so hurtful.
John McCain
#40. When Johnson decided to fight for passage of the law John F. Kennedy had put before Congress in June 1963 banning segregation in places of public accommodation, he believed he was taking considerable political risks.
Robert Dallek
#41. When you grow up in a totally segregated society, where everybody around you believes that segregation is proper, you have a hard time. You can't believe how much it's a part of your thinking.
Shelby Foote
#42. Amazing. Three hundred years of segregation undone by a single girl. She must be as incredible as she looks.
Veronica Rossi
#43. I concede that segregation can allay social tensions immediately, but it further debilitates us in the long run.
Richard Benjamin
#44. Be true. Be beautiful. Be free. In the midst of segregation and racism Mamma raised us to be independent and free. We saw ourselves as citizens of the world, not of a block.
Debbie Allen
#46. I am not a racist in any form whatsoever. I don't believe in any form of discrimination or segregation.
Malcolm X
#47. All reduction of people to objects, all imposition of labels and patterns to which they must conform, all segregation can lead only to destruction.
Maureen Duffy
#48. Segregation or separation is thus a basic principle of Biblical Law with respect to religion and morality. Every attempt to destroy this principle is an effort to reduce society to its lowest common denominator.
R.J. Rushdoony
#49. 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.
John Lewis
#50. But integration and equality are myths; they disguise a new segregation and a new equality ... Every social order institutes its own program of separation or segregation. A particular faith and morality is given privileged status and all else is separated for progressive elimination.
R.J. Rushdoony
#51. I grew up in North Carolina being told that the Bible approves slavery and segregation, that it was the will of God.
John Shelby Spong
#52. 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.
Jonathan Kozol
#53. Occasionally, as children, we might figure out how to call somebody a name, and they would figure out how to call us. But it wasn't - it was so light. It was so fluffy. I didn't really have a strong awareness of segregation and the separation of races until I left Lorain, Ohio.
Toni Morrison
#54. On the outside, America looks like this great melting pot, but on the inside, there's this segregation in American cinema. Why does a Latino film have to be for Latinos? Why is a black film just for black people? Why?
Gurinder Chadha
#55. Over time, this growing tendency of like marrying like will only reinforce clustering and geographic sorting along class lines, giving the emerging map of social, economic, and cultural segregation even greater permanence.
Richard Florida
#56. Through the dark days of legalized segregation and on into the civil rights era, jazz shone as a beacon for achieving interracial respect and understanding. It seemed as if the dream of a color-blind society was within reach in the jazz world, where musicians were judged on merit and not skin color.
Randy Sandke
#57. Personally I do not believe in a national agency devoted only to the negro blind because in spirit and principle I am against all segregation, and the blind already have difficulties enough without being cramped and harassed by social barriers.
Helen Keller
#58. Forced integration is just as wrong as forced segregation.
Barry Goldwater
#59. When growing up, I saw segregation. I saw racial discrimination. I saw those signs that said white men, colored men. White women, colored women. White waiting. And I didn't like it.
John Lewis
#60. The organizers and perpetuators of segregation are as much the enemy of America as any foreign invader.
Bayard Rustin
#61. Give dysgenic groups [people with 'bad genes'] in our population their choice of segregation or [compulsory] sterilization.
Margaret Sanger
#62. The transition between life in red-state America and life in the Arab capital was at times overwhelming because of the traditional segregation of men and women in many public and private settings.
G. Willow Wilson
#63. From slavery to segregation, we remember that America did not always live up to its ideals. In fact, we often fell far short of them. But we also learned that fundamental to our national character is the drive to live out the true meaning of our creed.
Bill Frist
#64. We didn't have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free.
Cab Calloway
#65. Everything that I've gone through informs me and my opinions in a way, I guess because I am a child of segregation. I lived through it. I lived in it. I was of it.
Samuel L. Jackson
#66. That is the great luxury of long-existing and accepted segregation in New York and almost every other major city of our nation nowadays. Nothing needs to be imposed on anyone. The evil is already set in stone. We just move in.
Jonathan Kozol
#67. A God who is good knows no segregation amongst words or names. And were a God to deny his blessing to those who pursue a different path to eternity, there would be no human who should offer worship.
Kahlil Gibran
#68. The great tragedy of segregation isn't so much that we see less of each other but that in separating from each other we see less of God.
Tullian Tchividjian
#69. I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights.
Joseph Stiglitz
#70. Many have fought for and even lost their lives to end segregation, to win the right to vote. It disappoints me to now have to cajole people to register and to vote.
Jesse Jackson
#71. Let the government not be an instructor but a parent who loves and adjusts to the needs of the nation, But remember a parent does what makes things look good to the entire family without segregation.
Auliq Ice
#72. 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.
David Boies
#73. In Florida, then, and for farm workers for the most part in the US, there's a real sense of economic segregation. In the South, the structures of economic segregation still existed.
Sanjay Rawal
#74. Today's residential segregation in the North, South, Midwest, and West is not the unintended consequence of individual choices and of otherwise well-meaning law or regulation but of unhidden public policy that explicitly segregated every metropolitan area in the United States.
Richard Rothstein
#75. In Stamps the segregation was so complete that most Black children didn't really, absolutely know what whites looked like.
Maya Angelou
#76. Apply a stern and rigid policy of sterilization and segregation to that grade of population whose progeny is already tainted, or whose inheritance is such that objectionable traits may be transmitted to offspring.
Margaret Sanger
#77. The question is really a kind of apathy and ignorance, which is the price we pay for segregation. That's what segregation means. You don't know what's happening on the other side of the wall, because you don't want to know.
Raoul Peck
#78. The tormented world cries out for internationhood, for co-existence in a harmony of diversity and mutual aid, for an end to self-segregation along secondary or superficial or downright imbecilic lines.
Clara Fraser
#79. 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.
Strom Thurmond
#80. Our religious police has the most dangerous effect on society - the segregation of genders, putting the wrong ideas in the heads of men and women, producing psychological diseases that never existed in our country before, like fanatacism.
Basmah Bint Saud
#81. The grand irony, however, is that Southern segregation was not brought to an end, nor redneck violence dramatically reduced, by violence.
Stanley Crouch
#82. The Bible Belt, the religious South, is the section of the country that practiced slavery until the war made them give it up. They practiced segregation. They practiced lynchings. I don't see any great value in that.
John Shelby Spong
#83. I was born in Columbia in 1954, the year the Supreme Court invalidated racial segregation in public schools. I visited frequently but did not live there.
Randall Kennedy
#84. It was almost inevitable. Those who worked directly for the Squires were only too glad to identify themselves with the rulers and make up for their real inferiority by a tighter adherence to the rules of segregation, a harsh and haughty attitude toward their fellows.
Isaac Asimov
#85. 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.
Rick Perlstein
#86. Do away with curriculum. Do away with segregation by age. And do away with the idea that there should be uniformity of all schools and of what people learn.
Seymour Papert
#87. 'Death at an Early Age' was about racial segregation in Boston. 'Illiterate America' was about grownups who can't read. 'Rachel and Her Children' was about people who were homeless in the middle of Manhattan.
Jonathan Kozol
#88. For some of us it seems like yesterday when Ike was in the White House, the U.S. Senate censured Joe McCarthy, and the Supreme Court unanimously ruled that racial segregation in public school was unconstitutional.
Malcolm Forbes
#89. What is our greatest enemy? Segregation.
Major Owens
#90. I never met a white person till I was a grown man. I never went to school with a white till I was twenty-six years old, at Harvard Law School. The insult of segregation was searing and unforgettable. It has left a great scar, and will be with me for the rest of my life.
Randall Robinson
#91. You know if we were to look back and how we were in 1955 living in Jim Crow, living in segregation, living in segregated schools, it's hard to believe that it was America, but it really was.
Anna Deavere Smith
#92. C'mon everybody, yeah, this is your life I'm talking about a revolution we gotta organize We don't need no segregation, we don't need no race New age revelation, I think we got a case. I'm OK as long as u are here with me Sexuality is all we ever need.
Prince
#93. We stand for the segregation of the races and the racial integrity of each race.
Strom Thurmond
#94. I bet they love those games on Friday night more than they do segregation.
Pat Conroy
#95. Many well-meaning intelligent people have argued since the May 17, 1954, decision of the United States Supreme Court outlawing segregation in the public schools that communication between the races has broken down.
Benjamin E. Mays
#96. Socially, segregation labeled African Americans as less than human; the term "boy" itself, applied to the Scottsboro defendants even as they became elderly, implied that they were less than men.
James W. Loewen
#97. 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.
Cab Calloway
#98. The only difference between [America] and South Africa, South Africa preaches separation and practices separation, America preaches integration and practices segregation. This is the only difference, they don't practice what they preach, whereas South Africa practices and preaches the same thing.
Malcolm X
#99. 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.
Jamie Dornan
#100. America preaches integration and practices segregation.
Malcolm X