175 Quotes by Isabel Wilkerson

Black passengers getting off in Washington had nothing to worry about. But for those continuing south, the crews who ran the train, the porters who helped passengers on and off, and the black passengers themselves knew to gather their things and move to the Jim Crow car up front to make sure the races were separated when the train crossed into the state of Virginia. The.

Anyplace but Here.

At one point, ten thousand were arriving every month in Chicago alone. It.

From the railcar window, the land looked to be indistinguishable, one state from another, just one big flat plain, and there was nothing in nature that one could see that said colored people should be treated one way on one side of the river and a different way on the other.

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.

Chicago. He said he had to. “I have to do this,” he said as he tried to steady himself after the stoning, “to expose myself – to bring this hate into the open.” He had marched in the deepest corners of Alabama but was unprepared for what he was in for in Chicago. “I have seen many demonstrations in the South,” he said that violent day in the Promised Land. “But I have never seen anything so hostile and so hateful as I’ve seen here today.

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.

How could it be that people were fighting to the death over something that was, in the end, so very ordinary?

She trusted God and nature more than any man and learned to be a better person watching the lower creatures of the earth.