Segregation Quotes

“There can be no deep disappointment where there is not deep love.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“Fiction has been maligned for centuries as being "false," "untrue," yet good fiction provides more truth about the world, about life, and even about the reader, than can be found in non-fiction.”
― Clark Zlotchew

“All good people agree,
And all good people say,
All nice people, like Us, are We
And every one else is They:
But if you cross over the sea,
Instead of over the way,
You may end by (think of it!) looking on We
As only a sort of They!”
― Rudyard Kipling, Debits And Credits

“When they reached their ship, Ed gazed out at the bay. It was black. The sky was black, but the bay was even blacker. It was a slick, oily blackness that glowed and reflected the moonlight like a black jewel. Ed saw the tiny specks of light around the edges of the bay where he knew ships must be docked, and at different points within the bay where vessels would be anchored. The lights were pale and sickly yellow when compared with the bright blue-white sparkle of the stars overhead, but the stars glinted hard as diamonds, cold as ice. Pg. 26.”
― Clark Zlotchew, Once upon a Decade: Tales of the Fifties

“UNDIVIDED

I am for
One world undivided.
One world without fear and corruption.
One world ruled by Truth and Justice.

I am for
One peaceful world for all,
Where hate has been overcome by love,
And everyone is guided only
By their conscience.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Music itself was color-blind but the media and the radio stations segregate it based on their perceptions of the artists.”
― Anthony Kiedis, Scar Tissue

“So when we looked at de picture and everybody got pointed out there wasn’t nobody left except a real dark little girl with long hair standing by Eleanor. Dat’s where Ah wuz’s s’posed to be, but Ah couldn’t recognize dat dark chile as me. So ah ast, ‘where is me? Ah don’t see me.’
… ‘Aw, aw! Ah’m colored!’
Den dey all laughed real hard. But before Ah seen de picture Ah thought Ah wuz just like the rest.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Anyone who looked more white folkish than herself was better than she was in her criteria, therefore it was right that they should be cruel to her at times, just as she was cruel to those more negroid than herself in direct ratio to their negroness…Like the pecking order in a chicken yard… Once having set up her idols and built altars to them it was inevitable that she would worship there.”
― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

“Crossing a single street transformed the way people talked, determined the size and condition of the homes, the dimension and character of the dreams.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad

“Wild animals look good in the jungle, not in the Oval Office.”
― Abhijit Naskar

“Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and the fountains, but the water itself.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“Listen, Junto,' he said. 'They can wave flags. They can tell me the Germans cut off baby's behinds and rape women and turn black men into slaves. They can tell me any damn thing. None of it means nothing.'

'Why?'

'Because, no matter how scared they are of Germans, they're still more scared of me. I'm black, see? And they hate Germans, but they hate me worse. If that wasn't so they wouldn't have a separate army for black men.”
― Ann Petry, The Street

“Now, the District was in the throes of slow but steady revital- ization and revival, driven on the backbone of the Kansas City African American community’s strong cultural roots, immense pride, art, community, baseball, barbecue, booze, and jazz. Historically segregated, but always shared by Black society. How different from the White society whose historical dividing line began just blocks away. Also historically segregated, but rarely shared.”
― Mark Shaiken, Fresh Start

“Another barrier fell in the Pacific theater in the spring of 1944, when the 24th Infantry Regiment and the 93rd Infantry Division became the first Black infantry troops to see combat in the war. Black infantry troops arrived as reinforcements on Bougainville Island, halfway between New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, after the majority of Japanese soldiers had been defeated.”
― Matthew F Delmont, Half American: The Epic Story of African Americans Fighting World War II at Home

“Brain divisive is brain insane.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Either Right or Human: 300 Limericks of Inclusion

“Mr. Lewis, how am I going to feel better in the morning when I know that snake is probably sitting in my living room right now, that shotgun across his lap, watching television?'
'You don't have to worry about that,' Tommy said. 'Ain't nothing good on television this time of night.”
― Walter Dean Myers, The Glory Field

“When I arrived at this all-white school that first day, all the white parents rushed in and pulled out their kids. They didn't want their children going to school with me. But why? I didn't understand. They had never met or even seen me before now, so how could they know what kind of person I was? But none of that mattered. I don't think they even saw a child. All they saw was the color of my skin. I was black, and that meant I didn't matter.”
― Ruby Bridges, This Is Your Time

“Only sin in the world is the sin of division.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Dervis Vadisi: 100 Promissory Sonnets

“Running was the only sport that could not be segregated by the government, could not be kept down by oppression, could not be bought out from under the feet of my peers. They could not, you see - they could not segregate the roads. Not during the day, anyway.”
― Barbara Bourland, The Force of Such Beauty

“Discrimination is only symptom, distance is the culprit.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yüz Şiirlerin Yüzüğü (Ring of 100 Poems, Bilingual Edition): 100 Turkish Poems with Translations

“Contaminate not the sweetness of soul,
with foul stench of segregated psyche.
Better stand civilized, without roots,
than be sentenced to inherited slavery.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Yüz Şiirlerin Yüzüğü (Ring of 100 Poems, Bilingual Edition): 100 Turkish Poems with Translations

“Delade är vi aska,
förenade är vi hjältar.
Integrerade vi lever,
Segregerade är vi döda.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Världsviking: Gudomlig Poesi

“It was against the law for a colored person and a white person to play checkers together in Birmingham. White and colored gamblers had to place their bets at separate windows and sit in separate aisles at racetracks in Arkansas. At saloons in Atlanta, the bars were segregated: Whites drank on stools at one end of the bar and blacks on stools at the other end, until the city outlawed even that, resulting in white-only and colored-only saloons. There were white parking spaces and colored parking spaces in the town square in Calhoun City, Mississippi. In one North Carolina courthouse, there was a white Bible and a black Bible to swear to tell the truth on.”
― Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration

“Tolerate no hate,
Moderate no help.
Segregate no shelf,
Alienate no sect.”
― Abhijit Naskar, World War Human: 100 New Earthling Sonnets

“Her father looked to the distance, out across the pond. “Sometimes I just get tired of bowin’ down and givin’ up, you know?”
It was Dr. Hawkins who nodded in agreement. He placed a hand on Papa’s broad shoulder, but then he added, “You know, Jonah, sometimes it’s best to wait till times get better.”
― Sharon M. Draper, Stella by Starlight

“The segregationist order was never stable. It was only the white southern myth of timeless tradition, a myth installed partly at gunpoint as an element of consolidation of ruling class power, that gave it the appearance of solidity. Retracing that history, which contained and shaped but generally lies beyond the insight that can be drawn from personal experience, is necessary to fill in the picture of what the Jim Crow South was. However, because of the ways the past lives imagistically so near the surface of the present in the South, moments occasionally erupt that encourage, perhaps demand, critical reflection on the region's actual history and that history's relation to social and political life today.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“For reasons that have less to do with an abstraction like white supremacy than with the dynamics of a political and economic regime that concentrates benefits at the top at the expense of everyone else, black New Orleanians are disproportionately–but by no means exclusively–likely to occupy the ranks of the dispossessed under that regime. And the terms on which the white supremacist past has been acknowledged and repudiated actually obscure the sources of inequality and dispossession today.

While the segregationist system was clearly and obviously racist and white supremacist, it wasn't merely about white supremacy for its own sake alone. It was the instrument of a specific order of political and economic power that was clearly racial but that most fundamentally stabilized and reinforced the dominance of powerful political and economic interests. White supremacy was and remains an ideology, and a very abstract one at that, and because it's so abstract–its basic premises and categories are fantasies–its practical warrants are always improvised.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“What seem to be vestiges of the Jim Crow world in a sense are just that. But passage of the old order's segregationist trappings throws into relief the deeper reality that what appeared and was experienced as racial hierarchy was also class hierarchy. Now blacks occupy positions in the socioeconomic order previously available only to whites, and whites occupy those previously identified with blacks. And the dynamics of superordination and subordination, patterns of appropriation and distribution, and dominant understandings of which material interests should drive policy remain much as they were.

This underscores the point that the core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology. Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests. At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it. That is the source of that bizarre sensation I felt in the region a generation after the defeat of Jim Crow. The larger takeaway from this reality is that a simple racism/anti-racism framework isn't adequate for making sense of the segregation era, and it certainly isn't up to the task of interpreting what has succeeded it or challenging the forms of inequality and injustice that persist.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“It is bemusing to observe when formative periods of one's past become grist for scholarly, ideological, and casual interpretation and debate and are constructed and reconstructed from the standpoint of current concerns and debates. That's also inevitable, on one level what history is. A danger, however, is that, when reckoning with the past becomes too much like an allegory, its nuances and contingencies, its essential open-endedness, can disappear. Then history can become either a narrative of inevitable, progressive unfolding to the present or, worse, a tendentious assertion that nothing has ever changed, and both divesting the past of its discrete foreignness and contingency or reducing it to the warm-up act for the present are handmaidens of ruling class power. The danger of that tendency is especially great in moments of ruling class triumphalism such as this one.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“Awake, Arise, Integrate - to segregate is to disintegrate!”
― Abhijit Naskar, Little Planet on The Prairie: Dunya Benim, Sorumluluk Benim