Desegregation Quotes & Sayings

When someone becomes transparent, then something shines through that person that has nothing to do with the person or any of his or her personal history. What is required is becoming so transparent that the self or ego dissolves. — Eckhart Tolle

When I was working my way up, it seemed to me that only Westerns and 'Star Treks' or sci-fi movies could afford to get away with presenting the problems - like prejudice and desegregation, for instance - that we face in our everyday lives. — Ed Asner

Some kind of affirmative action is important in a democracy and for economic competitiveness and national security. The Army was the first to realize that you had to have desegregation of a military to have it working properly. — Andrew Young

The 1957 crisis in Little Rock, brought about by the desegregation of Little Rock Central High School, was a huge part of the march toward freedom and opportunity in America. — Vic Snyder

I was taught in school that I have to look out for number one. That was against everything that I intuitively felt. — Tom Shadyac

Fifty years after Brown, we should have learned that there is no magic in white classmates. The magic lies at the intersection of educational opportunity and attitude - the coming together of teachers who know how to teach and children who are ready to learn. No one thing - not the ballot, not changes in school governance, not desegregation - will produce that happy confluence. We have to demand that the schools get ready for our children. But we also have to make sure, using every resource at our disposal, that our children are ready for school. — William Raspberry

One thing hatred can do very well is to attack what it hates! — Ernest Agyemang Yeboah

Desegregation of schools does not automatically transform them into better schools. It is only a step. The larger goal is to see that the education of our youth is not merely desegregated, but that it is excellent. — Robert Kennedy

Science is the knowledge of constant things, not merely of passing events, and is properly less the knowledge of general laws than of existing facts. — John Ruskin

Black Americans challenged segregation by repeatedly seeking admission to whites-only pools and by filing lawsuits against their cities. Eventually, these social and legal protests desegregated municipal pools throughout the North, but desegregation rarely led to meaningful interracial swimming. When black Americans gained equal access to municipal pools, white swimmers generally abandoned them for private pools. Desegregation was a primary cause of the proliferation of private swimming pools that occurred after the mid-1950s. By the 1970s and 1980s, tens of millions of mostly white middle-class Americans swam in their backyards or at suburban club pools, while mostly African and Latino Americans swam at inner-city municipal pools. America's history of socially segregated swimming pools — Jeff Wiltse

It's the reason we become enamored of certain singers, I think, because they project the voice we wish to summon within ourselves. His — Steve Almond

The longer you went without speaking, the harder it gets to break the silence. — Richard Bachman

Ethical and cultural desegregation. It is a contradiction in terms to scream race pride and equality while at the same time spurning Negro teachers and self-association. — Zora Neale Hurston

If children conform to the standards set by their peers, in the seventies and eighties the peer pressure for black children to keep with their own was intense. Before desegregation, "acting white" was a phrase no one had ever heard with regard to school involvement or academics. Yet in the wake of busing, it rose to become one of the most hurtful insults one black student could level at another. Talking white, dressing white, being enthusiastic about anything "white" was forsaking one's own. For the thirty-eight black students at Vestavia, there was the black cafeteria table and there were the other cafeteria tables, and it was one or the other. There was no going back and forth. — Tanner Colby

The people are applauding you because none of them understands you and applauding me because everybody understands me. [Charlie Chaplin to Albert Einstein] — Charlie Chaplin

Better than I was, more than I am
And all of this happen by taking your hand
And who I am now is who I wanted to be
And now that we're together
I'm stronger than ever I'm happy and free — Tim McGraw

Jim Grimsley's unflinching self-examination of his own boyhood racial prejudices during the era of school desegregation is one of the most compelling memoirs of recent years. Vivid, precise, and utterly honest, How I Shed My Skin is a time-machine of sorts, a reminder that our past is every bit as complex as our present, and that broad cultural changes are often intimate, personal, and idiosyncratic. — Dinty W. Moore

Mindset changes are not happening from change in legislation. Like desegregation. We legally got rid of legal segregation, but schools are still segregated. You can demand people have better math understanding, but it depends how you interpret math understanding, and what you want it for, and if you think everybody can and should have that. — Deborah Meier

I seek to be myself. — Lailah Gifty Akita

In 1970, a superior Court judge issues an order forcing the desegregation of Los Angeles schools. The judge survives an assassination attempt and loses his job in the next election. — James Frey

I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it. — Charlie Munger

Desegregation is a joke. — Nina Simone

Republican strategist Kevin Phillips is often credited for offering the most influential argument in favor of a race-based strategy for Republican political dominance in the South. He argued in The Emerging Republican Majority, published in 1969, that Nixon's successful presidential election campaign could point the way toward long-term political realignment and the building of a new Republican majority, if Republicans continued to campaign primarily on the basis of racial issues, using coded antiblack rhetoric.54 He argued that Southern white Democrats had become so angered and alienated by the Democratic Party's support for civil rights reforms, such as desegregation and busing, that those voters could be easily persuaded to switch parties if those racial resentments could be maintained. — Michelle Alexander

We may distinguish both true and false needs. "False" are those which are superimposed upon the individual by particular social interests in his repression: the needs which perpetuate toil, aggressiveness, misery, and injustice. Their satisfaction might be most gratifying to the individual, but this happiness is not a condition which has to be maintained and protected if it serves to arrest the development of the ability (his own and others) to recognize the disease of the whole and grasp the chances of curing the disease. The result then is euphoria in unhappiness. Most of the prevailing needs to relax, to have fun, to behave and consume in accordance with the advertisements, to love and hate what others love and hate, belong to this category of false needs. — Herbert Marcuse

Every time you work, it's a new film, and generally when you work with auteurs, people that write and direct their films, there's always an originality. — Isabella Rossellini

Unlike [Woodrow] Wilson, Louis Brandeis did not support the segregation of the federal government. He was personally courteous to African Americans. He advised them and advised the head of Howard University to create a good law school. And that inspired Charles Hamilton Houston and Thurgood Marshall in their path-breaking work on behalf of desegregation. — Jeffrey Rosen

There wouldn't be a Halle Berry or an Angela Bassett or a Cicely Tyson if there hadn't been a Lena Horne. — Dee Dee Bridgewater

The future of desegregation was not just about reaching mere numerical diversity. It was about fostering radical diversity, the wild protean sort. It was about what might flower when people could really meet across the lines. The cover of the fifth volume of the Yardbird Reader, rendered in day-bright Oakland A's yellow and green, featured the collective caught as they laughed at someone's wisecrack. They looked simultaneously hip and welcoming. In this colorized vision of American renewal, everyone could share in the joy. — Jeff Chang