Famous Quotes & Sayings

John Howard Griffin Quotes & Sayings

Enjoy the top 84 famous quotes, sayings and quotations by John Howard Griffin.

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Famous Quotes By John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 117937

Forgetting myself for a moment, I stopped to study the menu that was elegantly exposed in a show window. I read, realizing that a few days earlier I could have gone in and ordered anything on the menu. But now, though I was the same person with the same appetite, the same appreciation and even the same wallet, no power on earth could get me inside this place for a meal. I recalled hearing some Negro say, "You can live here all your life, but you'll never get inside one of the great restaurants except as a kitchen boy." The Negro often dreams of things separated from him only by a door, knowing that he is forever cut off from experiencing them. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1106479

A law is not good merely because the legislature wills it, but the legislature has the mortal duty to will only that which is good. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 839440

Your blanks have been filled in far differently from those of a child grown up in the filth and poverty — John Howard Griffin

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When enough Americans realize how rotten are the fruits of our policy of 'benign neglect,' how costly our prejudice is both in dollars and in human misery, the demand for change will be made-not for the sake of minority people, but for the sake of all of us. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1865138

It was now pointed out that the black male child, even in a black school using white textbooks, could early come to the conclusion that all the heroes in history were white men. Furthermore, with the exception of nationally known black civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, James Farmer, and others, the black male child frequently saw the adult black male as ineffectual and defeated. The old picture of the white man leading the black man by the hand toward the solution to his problems again gave the black male child a view of the adult black male as something not worth becoming, and killed his spirit and his will to become an adult, problem-solving individual. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1932583

Certainly many Northern cities deplored what was going on in the South. But when Martin Luther King, who had been so praised in the North for the work he did in the South, came to work in the cities of the North, the very officials who had praised him sometimes led opposition to his work locally. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1187886

Someone in a high place - the mayor, chief of police, or other official - would receive information that a neighboring city was already in flames and that carloads of armed black men were coming to attack this city. This happened in Cedar Rapids when Des Moines was allegedly in flames. It happened in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and in Fort Worth, Texas, when it was alleged that Oklahoma City was in flames and carloads were converging on those cities. It happened in Reno and other western cities, when Oakland, California, was supposed to be in flames. It happened in Roanoke when Richmond, Virginia, was supposed to be in flames. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 184713

Yes, and then it's these things that cause the whites to say we're not worthy of first-class citizenship." "Ah ... " He dropped his hands to his sides hard in frustration. "Isn't it so? They make it impossible for us to earn, to pay much in taxes because we haven't much in income, and then they say that because they pay most of the taxes, they have the right to have things like they want. It's a vicious circle, Mr. Griffin, and I don't know how we'll get out of it. They put us low, and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can't deserve our rights. — John Howard Griffin

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In reality, the Us-and-Them or I-and-Thou dichotomies do not exist. There is only one universal We - one human family united by the capacity to feel compassion and to demand equal justice for all. — John Howard Griffin

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Racists are not the pipe-smoking type, I thought to myself. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 677804

We need a conversion of morals," the elderly man said. "Not just superficially, but profoundly. And in both races. We need a great saint - some enlightened common sense. Otherwise, we'll never have the right answers when the pressure groups - those racists, super-patriots, whatever you want to call them - tag every move toward racial justice as communist-inspired, Zionist-inspired, Illuminati-inspired, Satan-inspired ... part of some secret conspiracy to overthrow the Christian civilization. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1853776

He was not talking with US, but with his IMAGE of us. — John Howard Griffin

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I'm annoyed by those who love mankind but are discourteous to people. — John Howard Griffin

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Now you go into oblivion. — John Howard Griffin

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It was a little thing, but on top of the other little things, it broke something in me. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1587150

It was the ghetto. I had seen them before from the high altitude of one who could look down and pity. Now I belonged here and the view was different. A first glance told it all. Here it was pennies and clutter and spittle on the curb... Here was the indefinable stink of despair. Here modesty was the luxury. People struggled for it... Here sensuality was escape, proof of manhood for people who could prove it no other way... Here hips drew the eye and flirted with the eye and caused the eye to lust or laugh. It was better to look at hips than at the ghetto. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1323883

Nothing can describe the withering horror of this. You feel lost, sick at heart before such unmasked hatred, not so much because it threatens you as because it shows humans in such an inhuman light. You see a kind of insanity, something so obscene the very obscenity of it (rather than its threat) terrifies you. It was so new I could not take my eyes from the man's face. I felt like saying: What in God's name are you doing to yourself? — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1213910

The author explains that some find recourse from injustice in literature and art but that these tend to deepen sensitivity to injustice rather than dull it. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1844125

Local white leadership was discredited in the eyes of black people, too, by their insistence on asking me, when we met to discuss the local events, usually with black people, if I had discovered who was the traveling black agitator who had come in and stirred up their "good black people." And had I discovered if there were any communists behind the disruptions? — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1034434

They don't deal with any basic difference in human nature between black and white ... , they only study the effects of environment on human nature. You place the white man in the ghetto, deprive him of educational advantages, arrange it so he has to struggle hard to fulfill his instinct for self-respect, give him little physical privacy and leisure time, and he would after a time assume the same characteristics you attach to the Negro. These characteristics don't spring from whiteness or blackness, but from a man's conditioning. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 377474

They put us low, and then blame us for being down there and say that since we are low, we can't deserve our rights." Others — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1913382

This tendency to make laws that are convenient or advantageous rather than right has mushroomed. — John Howard Griffin

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He showed me the lowest. I had to surmise the highest. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1093524

Newspapers play up as sensational every attempt by a Negro to rape a white woman. Yet this white rape of Negro women is apparently a different matter. But it is rape nonetheless, and practiced on a scale that dwarfs the Negro's defaults. The — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1193249

He told me how all of the white men in the region craved colored girls. He said he hired a lot of them both for housework and in his business. "And I guarantee you, I've had it in every one of them before they ever got on the payroll." A pause. Silence above humming tires on the hot-top road. "What do you think of that?" "Surely some refuse," I suggested cautiously. "Not if they want to eat - or feed their kids," he snorted. "If they don't put out, they don't get the job. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 284104

DESEGREGATE THE BUSES WITH THIS 7 POINT PROGRAM:

1. Pray for guidance.
2. Be courteous and friendly.
3. Be neat and clean.
4. Avoid loud talk.
5. Do not argue.
6. Report incidents immediately.
7. Overcome evil with good.
Sponsored by Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance
Rev. A. L. Davis, Pres.
Rev. J. E. Poindexter, Secretary — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 786797

Many otherwise decent men and women could find no other solution. They are willing to degrade themselves to their basest levels to prevent the traditional laborer from rising in status or, to put it bluntly, from "winning," even though what he wins has been rightfully his from the moment he was born into the human race. I — John Howard Griffin

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He who is less than just is less than man. — John Howard Griffin

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The completeness of this transformation appalled me. It was unlike anything I had imagined. I became two men, the serving one, and the one who panicked, who felt Negroid even to the depths of my entrails. I felt the beginings of great loneliness, not because I was a Negro, but because the man I had been, the self I knew, was hidden in the flesh of another. — John Howard Griffin

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Eventually, some black thinkers believe, this "separation" may be the shortest route to an authentic communication at some future date when blacks and whites can enter into encounters in which they truly speak as equals and in which the white man will no longer load every phrase with unconscious suggestions that he has something to "concede" to black men or that he wants to help black men "overcome" their blackness. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1701528

For so long as we condone injustice by a small but powerful group, we condone the destruction of all social stability, all real peace, all trust in man's good intentions toward his fellow man. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 277407

We must return to them their lawful rights, assure equality of justice - and then everybody leave everybody else to hell alone. Paternalistic - we show our prejudice in our paternalism - we downgrade their dignity. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 2213867

Some whites, who had never really understood, were offended by this sudden death of their role as the "good white leading the poor black out of the jungle." Many of these were among the saddest people of our time, good-hearted whites who had dedicated themselves to helping black people become imitation whites, to "bringing them up to our level," without ever realizing what a deep insult this attitude can be. — John Howard Griffin

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We led strange, hidden lives. We were advocating one thing: that this country rid itself of the racism that prevented some citizens from living as fully functioning men and as a result dehumanized all men. We were advocating only that this country live up to its promises to all citizens. But since racism always hides under a respectable guise - usually the guise of patriotism and religion - a great many people loathed us for knocking holes in these respectable guises. It was clear that we would have to live always under threat. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1781776

The Negro. The South. These are details. The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared, and detested. I could have been a Jew in Germany, a Mexican in a number of states, or a member of any 'inferior' group. Only the details would have differed. The story would be the same. — John Howard Griffin

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The emotional garbage I had carried all of those years - the prejudice and the denial, the shame and the guilt - was dissolved by understanding that the Other is not other at all. — John Howard Griffin

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measure up - disillusion us by showing — John Howard Griffin

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Our experience with the Nazis had shown one thing: where racism is practiced, it damages the whole community, not just the victim group. Were we racists or were we not? That was the important thing to discover. — John Howard Griffin

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He was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1839427

In no instance were these reports true or were any of these cities actually in flames. But the result was immediate action on the part of white officials. They got in contact with important community and industrial leaders. Riot control measures were ordered into effect. Civilians armed themselves for the coming attack and stationed themselves at strategic points. In most cases many whites became aware of the "danger" and no local black person had any idea what was going on, — John Howard Griffin

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We fill too many gutters while we argue unimportant points and confuse issues. — John Howard Griffin

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All human beings face the same fundamental problems of loving and of suffering, of striving toward human aspirations for themselves and their children, of simply being and inevitably dying. These are the basic truths in all people, the common denominators of all cultures and all races and all ethnic categories. In — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 2092845

How can you render the duties of justice to men when they may destroy you? — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 2063919

We shall remain prisoners of culture unless we become aware of the process and force ourselves to confront it and to deprogram it. — John Howard Griffin

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All the courtesies in the world do not cover up the one vital and massive discourtesy. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1888674

Now you take dark Negroes like you, Mr. Griffin, and me," he went on. "We're old Uncle Toms to our people, no matter how much education and morals we've got. No, you have to be almost a mulatto, have your hair conked and all slicked out and look like a Valentino. Then the Negro will look up to you. You've got class. Isn't that a pitiful hero-type?"
"And the white man knows that," Mr. Davis said.
"Yes," the cafe owner continued. "He utilizes this knowledge to flatter some of us, tell us we're above our people, not like most Negroes. We're so stupid we fall for it and work against own own. Why, if we'd work just half as hard to boost our race as we do to please whites whose attentions flatter us, we'd really get somewhere. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1890828

A love for his child was so profound, it spilled over to all humanity. — John Howard Griffin

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I remained in my room more and more each day. The situation in Montgomery was so strange I decided to try passing back into white society. — John Howard Griffin

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I traveled from city to city in those days, and the view from within the ghettos was terrible and terrifying. While white people in the periphery were arming themselves against the day when they would have to defend themselves from attack by blacks (and really believed someone was fomenting a racial war in which black people would rise up and attack them), black people mostly without arms huddled inside the ghettos feeling that they were surrounded by armed whites. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 175762

But part of that incipient racism had always led whites to assume the leadership positions and perpetuated the view that whites rather than blacks were the heroes of the movement. — John Howard Griffin

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In Black Like Me, I tried to establish one simple fact, which was to reveal the insanity of a situation where a man is judged by his skin color, by his philosophical "accident" - rather than by who he is in his humanity. — John Howard Griffin

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If the judgement makes the law and not the law directs the judgement, it is impossible there should be such a thing as an illegal judgement given. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 2036431

We, who were reduced to eating on the sidewalk , were suddenly elevated in status by this man's misery. We were the aristocrats and he the beggar. It flattered us. We were superbly above him and the comedy gave us a delusion of high self-respect. In a while, the magnanimity of the rich would complete the picture. We would feed our scraps to the poor. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1015989

We were Negroes and our concern was the white man and how to get along with him; how to hold our own and raise ourselves in his esteem without for one moment letting him think he had any God-given rights that we did not also have. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 343613

Customers came - whites, Negroes and Latin Americans. Well-dressed tourists mingled with the derelicts of the quarter. When we shined their shoes we talked. The whites, especially the tourists, had no reticence before us, and no shame since we were Negroes. Some wanted to know where they could find girls, wanted us to get Negro girls for them. We learned to spot these from the moment they sat down, for they were immediately friendly and treated us with the warmth and courtesy of equals. I mentioned this to Sterling. "Yeah, when they want to sin, they're very democratic," he said. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 369399

The core concept in Griffin's writings about racism - that members of dominant groups tend to view minorities, because they seem different in some extrinsic way, as intrinsically other, and "as merely underdeveloped versions of their own imprisoning culture" - was intuited in Black Like Me and articulated in a seminal essay, "The Intrinsic Other — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 386950

I knew, and every black man there knew, that I, as a man now white once again, could say the things that needed saying but would be rejected if black men said them. — John Howard Griffin

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Existence nullified by men; reaffirmed by nature. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 573153

This system of discrimination, an inculcated double standard, may vary in content from culture to culture, but it is always unjust. There are thousands of kinds of injustice but there is only one kind of justice - equal justice for all. To call for a little more justice, or a moderately gradual sort of justice, is to call for no justice. That is a simple truth. — John Howard Griffin

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My revulsion turned to grief that my own people could give the hate stare, could shrivel men's souls, could deprive humans of rights they unhesitatingly accord their livestock. I — John Howard Griffin

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Humanity does not differ in any profound way; there are not essentially different species of human beings. If we could only put ourselves in the shoes of others to see how we would react, then we might become aware of the injustice of discrimination and the tragic inhumanity of every kind of prejudice. — John Howard Griffin

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him dumfounded as he chanted the Gregorian — John Howard Griffin

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He kept himself in line with popular opinion, which meant popular prejudice. — John Howard Griffin

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The Southern Negro will not tell the white man the truth. He long ago learned that if he speaks a truth unpleasing to the white, the white will make life miserable for him. The — John Howard Griffin

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The great danger in the South comes precisely from the fact that the public is not informed. Newspapers shirk notoriously their editorial responsibilities and print what they think their readers want. They lean with the prevailing winds and employ every fallacy of logic in order to editorialize harmoniously with popular prejudices. They also keep a close eye on possible economic reprisals from the Councils and the Klans, plus other superpatriotic groups who bring pressure to bear on the newspapers' advertisers. In addition, most adhere to the long-standing conspiracy of silence about anything remotely favorable to the Negro. His achievements are carefully excluded or, when they demand attention, are handled with the greatest care to avoid the impression that anything good the individual Negro does is typical of his race. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 889184

After the first difficulties in Rochester, New York, I was asked to consult with community leaders. I went and spoke for quite a long time. The leaders were concerned and sincere men. The first question one of them asked after I talked was: "Well, Mr. Griffin, what is the first thing we should do now?" I told him that I had been asked to come and consult with community leaders, and yet I was sitting in a room full of white men. The white man who had asked the question slapped his forehead in real chagrin. "It never occurred to me to ask any of them," he said apologetically. — John Howard Griffin

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Didn't Shakespeare say something about 'every fool in error can find a passage of Scripture to back him up'? He knew his religious bigots. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1003747

What fragmented individualism really meant was what happened to a black man who tried to make it in this society: in order to succeed, he had to become an imitation white man - dress white, talk white, think white, express the values of middle-class white culture (at least when he was in the presence of white men). Implied in all this was the hiding, the denial, of his selfhood, his negritude, his culture, as though they were somehow shameful. If he succeeded, he was an alienated marginal man - alienated from the strength of his culture and from fellow black men, and never able, of course, to become that imitation white man because he bore the pigment that made the white man view him as intrinsically other. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1004184

Fear dims even the sunlight. — John Howard Griffin

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If virtue does not equal powers, powers will be misused. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1056541

The same principle held in black universities, where students demanded more and more black teachers. White professors who had virtually dedicated their lives and their academic careers as historians, anthropologists, sociologists, to the problems of racism and its cures, thinking they did this for the good of the oppressed victims of racism (and often suffering social and academic insults as a result), were asked to leave schools in favor of black teachers. Some of them turned very bitter. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1062035

When the riot controls had been put into effect, and a nervous white population was waiting, it took little to set it off. In Wichita, a few white youths drove down into the black area and simply fired off guns. This brought black people out of their houses; in rage at seeing the harassment, they hurled stones or sticks at a passing car, and the battle was on. In that particular instance the police arrested the five whites who were armed and twelve young black men who had only rocks and sticks. All were jailed. The next morning, all were released on bail, but the bail set for the five armed whites was only one-fifth the amount set for the twelve unarmed black students. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1074453

However it might go, I should have no regrets. If I should be reduced to begging in the street, then I should enjoy the feel of pavement beneath my feet and the odors of asphalt and automobile exhausts. Good and bad fortune were equally attractive when viewed in such a context. Hunger was as interesting as satiety. A life without sight was as interesting as life with sight. Who was to say different? Society? The bulk of humanity?
They were living their first lives, cautiously aware that someday they would die. They had everything to lose. They could not take the risks. But I had been through death, had my insides burned out by it twice.
I was living a second life, freed of those cautious awarenesses.
I had nothing to lose. I could take all the risks. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1084176

The real story is the universal one of men who destroy the souls and bodies of other men (and in the process destroy themselves) for reasons neither really understands. It is the story of the persecuted, the defrauded, the feared and detested. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 196335

God is invoked ... and He is invoked against the God of the spirit, of intelligence and love - excluding and hating this God. What an extraordinary spiritual phenomenon this is: people believe in God and yet do not know God. The idea of God is affirmed and at the same time disfigured and perverted. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1112534

Phew!" His small blue eyes shone with repugnance, a look of such unreasoning contempt for my skin that it filled me with despair. It was a little thing, but piled on all the other little things it broke something in me. Suddenly I had had enough. Suddenly I could stomach no more of this degradation - not of myself but of all men who were black like me. — John Howard Griffin

John Howard Griffin Quotes 1115319

The author meets an African-American who observes that his fellows who begin with aspirations to a good education, solid career, and the raising of a family slowly lose that incentive. Even those who have a college education, he observes, need to take menial jobs and begin to look for excitement in less productive places. — John Howard Griffin

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Every fool in error can find a passage of scripture to back him up — John Howard Griffin

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If we say, as we do, that no one in this country intends for racism to lead to genocide, the effects of racism are genocidal, regardless of our intentions. — John Howard Griffin

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In the context of today, this WAS heroism. — John Howard Griffin

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A couple of years ago I was seated in an auditorium in Detroit where Reverend Cleage was explaining to a conference of priests that what they called "black separatists" were in reality men who recognized the implacability of a white-imposed separation. — John Howard Griffin

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Turning off all the lights, I went into the bathroom and closed the door. I stood in the darkness before the mirror, my hand on the light switch. I forced myself to flick it on.
In the flood of light against white tile, the face and shoulders of a strange
a fierce, bald, very dark Negro
glared at me from the glass. He in no way resembled me.
The transformation was total and shocking. I had expected to see myself disguised, but this was something else. I was imprisoned in the flesh of an utter stranger, an unsympathetic one with whom I felt no kinship. All traces of the John Griffin I had been were wiped from existence. — John Howard Griffin

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To live in a world where men do not love, where they cheat and are callous, is to sink into a preoccupation with death, and to see the futility of anything except virtue. — John Howard Griffin

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I learned a strange thing... that in a jumble of unintelligible talk, the word "nigger" leaps out with electric clarity. You always hear it and it always stings. And always it casts the person using it into a category of brute ignorance. I thought with some amusement that if these two women only knew what they were revealing about themselves to every Negro on that bus, they would have been outraged. — John Howard Griffin