Best 654 quotes in «african american quotes» category

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.

The Tea Party is protecting its millionaire and oil company friends while gutting critical services that they know protect the livelihood of African-Americans, as well as Latinos and other disadvantaged minorities.

The thing to do is to get organized; keep separated and you will be exploited, you will be robbed, you will be killed. Get organized and you will compel the world to respect you.

The treatment of African and African American culture in our education was no different from their treatment in Tarzan movies.

The truth is... everything counts. Everything. Everything we do and everything we say. Everything helps or hurts; everything adds to or takes away from someone else.

The tyranny of Harvard and Yale is another thing that transcends this problem of the set point. But what's so striking about [Louis] Brandeis is he had this vision of cultural pluralism that completely gave the lie to the idea that there was any inconsistency between being Jewish or being a woman or being African American and being fully American.

The whole world opened to me when I learned to read.

The whole idea of the first female president is not nearly as momentous or exciting as the first African-American.

They throw the ball, I hit it. They hit the ball, I catch it.

The writer in me can look as far as an African-American woman and stop. Often that writer looks through the African-American woman. Race is a layer of being, but not a culmination.

Things are shifting; man is evolving in many different ways. The Internet has created a portal for people to connect with each other in a way they never could have before. When it comes to African-American or black films, it's different because there is a model that you can actually look at, an equation that shows that these films earn money.

To be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.

This is the place where anybody - like an African American kid raised by a single mom - can be president.

To be a slaveholder meant one had to regard the African American as inferior in every way.

To be a survivor as an African American man - maybe any man - you have to be pretty tough. Or at least that's what we all understand.

This is, for an accomplished Latino, an accomplished African American, an accomplished anyone who disproves stereotypes, it's a constant battle in your life.

This whole notion that all African-Americans are not going to vote for Obama is not necessarily true. I believe a third would vote for me, based on my own anecdotal feedback. Not vote for me because I'm black but because of my policies.

Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal.

Too many young African-American and Latino men ended up in jail for nonviolent offenses.

Too often the media assumes that "poverty" is an African American or a Latino issue. Of course, that's nonsense. While a higher percentage of the African American and Latino population does live in poverty as compared to the white population, when overall numbers are looked at, it is clear that people of all races, ethnicities, and colors, are represented amongst America's poor.

To my knowledge, no progressive educator has ever suggested that children didn't need to know the "mere facts" about the contributions of African Americans to our society.

To understand how Republicans lost the African American vote, we must first understand how we won the African American vote.

To simply say that black people made allegations that substantiated an unfair and selective prosecution where you had more than half of the counts thrown out, where you had 27 counts where it took the jury less than four hours to find them not guilty - that speaks to fact that here we have three civil-rights activists, acquitted. What we have here is a prosecution that was baseless, a prosecution that chilled African Americans right to vote.

To those African-Americans suffering in our country, I say, what do you have to lose? Vote for Trump, I'm going to fix it.

We African Americans have now spent the major part of the 20th Century battling racism

We can see that the complexity we witness inside the African-American community today has always been there. Black people were just as noble and just as ignoble as anybody else.

We all remember that [Donald] Trump was one of the leaders of the so-called birther movement trying to delegitimize the presidency of our first African-American president Barack Obama, which is an outrage.

We all too often have socialism for the rich and rugged free market capitalism for the poor.

We did really, really badly with older African-American voters. I mean we got decimated.

We forget the conditions - not only in slavery - but after slavery, when there was this purposeful locking out of African Americans from economic opportunity. Or we forget today's incarceration rates, and educational and housing discrimination; all of these things. We pretend that everything that has happened happened long ago, and then we act as if we all now just treat each other equally, everything will be fine.

We don't intend to always keep this necessarily African oriented. Originally I had hoped to have African American Indian of this area, and the Appalachian of this area, but at the same time, just as we have the Haitian room, we will always have room for another exhibit.

We had two African American writers [Eric Monte and Michael Evans] on the show ['Good Times'] that knew Cabrini Green inside and out, and that's why we set it there.

We have to help African American people that, for the most part, are stuck there, Hispanic American people. We have Hispanic-American people that are in the inner cities and they are living in hell.

We have a wonderful history behind us. ... If you are unable to demonstrate to the world that you have this record, the world will say to you, 'You are not worthy to enjoy the blessings of democracy or anything else'.

We have a situation where we have our inner cities, African- Americans, Hispanics are living in he'll because it's so dangerous. You walk down the street, you get shot.

We have to protect our inner cities, because African-American communities are being decimated by crime, decimated.

We're also going to fix our inner cities. Forty-five percent of African-American children are - under the age six - are living in poverty.

We must go beyond textbooks, go out into the bypaths and untrodden depths of the wilderness and travel and explore and tell the world the glories of our journey.

We must serve consciously as caring role models, emphasizing the ethic of service, not consumption.

We must never forget that Black History is American History. The achievements of African Americans have contributed to our nation's greatness.

We must protect the civil rights of American citizens - African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and all Americans - by ensuring that their jobs, wages, and well-being come first.

We recriminalized black life. Incarceration rates since the 1908s have gone through the roof, overwhelmingly black males, women and Hispanics to some extent. Essentially re-doing what happened under Reconstruction. That's the history of African Americans - so how can any one say there's no problem. Sure, racism is serious, but it's worse than that.

We’ve gone through the names—Negro, African American, African, Black. For me that’s an indication of a people still trying to find their identity. Who determines what is black?

We still have too many Americans who give in to their fears of those who are different from them. Not so long ago, swastikas were painted on the doors of some African-American members of our Special Forces at Ft. Bragg. They are special forces. They do not deserve to have swastikas on their doors.

What I want to do is basically tell my generation's story about how music and culture helped affect a generation, and a generation that's so profound, that it went on to elect the first African-American president.

We were segregated throughout the community, and it was pretty brutal, actually. It didn't appear to be, on the surface.People got along and we had great relationships, but there was discrimination that impacted adversely the ability of the African-American community to progress. People did not - were in denial about that fact.

What city has given the world more in terms of American culture than New Orleans? There is none. Not New York. Not L.A. Not Chicago. Not anywhere, in the sense that African American music has gone around the world twenty times over, and it's continuing to evolve. It is our greatest cultural export.

What happens is sometimes these congregations will still have the white style of worship, even though they're mixed, because folks are willing to give up whatever they may have come with. So it's still quite a stretch for African Americans, yeah.

What they call you is one thing. What you answer to is something else.

What the Nazis did to the Jews in Europe, plantation owners and law enforcement [officers] were doing to the African-Americans.