365 Quotes About Race-relations

I am a Negro and I know, being dark, I have been due in the past to see dark days, but them days is passing. All the fiery crosses in the world is not going to scare me back into where I were before the Harlem riots, Martin Luther King, Adam Powell, and Malcolm X. Also, I might include that lady, Annie Lee Cooper, who hit Sheriff Clark in the eye in Alabama. When a Southern colored woman hits a Southern white sheriff in the eye in a public place like Selma, a new day has come.

The majority of white persons were "teetering" between a desire to cling to the pattern they had always known and a feeling that integration must take place. Any hesitation or temporary retreat on the part of Negroes would confuse white persons and drive them back to the old pattern.

This is not a story--and this is not a moment--for black people. This is a story and a moment for all Americans. And that the more Americans understand their past, understand their commitment, understand how we all are shaped by race, that gives us the kind of foundation to effect change.

Of course, as the United States built a safety net that excluded and punished black families, it created a wealth-building apparatus to buoy and enrich white ones. It is not market forces and individual effort alone that determine who succeeds and prospers and who remains impoverished and excluded in the United States, but government policy and deep-seated cultural and societal mores.

Now I do not understand Why God don't protect a manFrom police brutality.Being poor and black,I've no weapon to strike back--So who but the LordCan protect me?

In the South, we knew our adversary would stop at nothing to silence our activism. We knew we could never match his readiness to annihilate our resistance. So we ceded him that ground and challenged him instead to defend himself against the work of loving peace.

The people who think of themselves as White have the choice of becoming human or irrelevant.Or--as they are, indeed, already, in all but actual fact: obsolete. For, if trouble don't last always, as the Preacher tells us, neither does Power, and it is on the fact or the hope or the myth of Power that that identity which calls itself White has always seemed to depend.

Individual cultures and ideologies have their appropriate uses but none of them erase or replace the universal experiences, like love and weeping and laughter, common to all human beings.

Eventually, Coleen calls. We have coffee. Coleen asks, “Why haven’t you called?”I’m inadequate at breaking up too. I say, “I’ve been really busy.”“Will you call later?”“Not sure.”Our relationship won’t end in fireworks. Instead, it’ll end in a whimper. I see myself as she does, a bad boyfriend. Coleen is frustrated, exasperated that I’ve kept her at a distance. We sip coffee. The world passes. I’m convinced that if I continue trying, one day I’ll succeed.