Quotes & Sayings About Jim Crow Laws

Ending feudalism, ending slavery, enacting labor laws, winning universal suffrage, ending Jim Crow laws, overcoming much of the mindset and practice of patriarchy as it was entrenched in the '50s and '60s, bringing gay rights and liberation into the light of social policy and practice. Putting ecology on the political map. The left has a long lineage. — Michael Albert

People have said over the years that the reason I did not give up my seat was because I was tired. I did not think of being physically tired. My feet were not hurting. I was tired in a different way. I was tired of seeing so many men treated as boys and not called by their proper names or titles. I was tired of seeing children and women mistreated and disrespected because of the color of their skin. I was tired of Jim Crow laws, of legally enforced racial segregation. — Rosa Parks

Overt bigotry, Jim Crow laws and policies, government-mandated discrimination, and the belief in black inferiority have virtually disappeared. Laissez-faire racism, instead, involves persistent negative stereotyping of African Americans, a tendency to blame blacks for their own conditions, appeals to meritocracy, and resistance to meaningful policy efforts to ameliorate America's racist social conditions and institutions. Government is formally race neutral and committed to antidiscrimination, and most white Americans prefer a more volitional and cultural, as opposed to inherent and biological, interpretation of blacks' disadvantage status. — Thomas M. Shapiro

Time begins the healing process of wounds cut deeply by oppression. We soothe ourselves with the salve of attempted indifference, accepting the false pattern set up by the horrible restriction of Jim Crow laws. — Rosa Parks

Like Jim Crow (and slavery), mass incarceration operates as a tightly networked system of laws, policies, customs, and institutions that operate collectively to ensure the subordinate status of a group defined largely by race. — Michelle Alexander

The history of African-American repression in this country rose from government-sanctioned racism. Jim Crow laws were a product of bigoted state and local governments. — Rand Paul

Let me be clear: I support the Civil Rights Act because I overwhelmingly agree with the intent of the legislation, which was to stop discrimination in the public sphere and halt the abhorrent practice of segregation and Jim Crow laws. — Rand Paul

Who will protect your rights better? A king, president or you? Who will protect the truth? A reporter, a labor union or you? Who will protect and teach your children to seek truth? A textbook committee, an education bureaucrat, or you? Did a commission of wise men stop the Holocaust? Did a committee of Congress end Jim Crow? No. In each case, the work was done by individuals who would not abide convenient lies. They saw injustice and they called it out. They saw their nation wage war against a single group and they said "not in my name." They didn't wait for the conventions of society to catch up to God's laws. They pushed. They pressed. And they were victorious. — Glenn Beck

In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

I wouldn't vote against getting rid of the Jim Crow laws. — Ron Paul

The perpetuation of slavery, the exile and extermination of American Indians, and the passage of Jim Crow laws weren't carried out at the bidding of a few malefactors of great wealth. — P. J. O'Rourke

When I say that someone is being treated like a criminal, I mean that person is being treated like he broke the law or otherwise did something wrong. (When I want to say someone is being treated as less than human, I say that person is being treated like an animal, not a criminal.) Her chattel slavery and Jim Crow analogies are similarly tortured and yet another effort to explain away stark racial differences in criminality. But unlike prisons, those institutions punished people for being black, not for misbehaving. (A slave who never broke the law remained a slave.) Yet Alexander insists that we blame police and prosecutors and drug laws and societal failures - anything except individual behavior - and even urges the reader to reject the notion of black free will. — Jason L. Riley

There are black Christians, and black Muslims in Africa who are being slaughtered, they don't want to hear about the Jim Crow laws. There are Christians, there are other Muslims being slaughtered in the Middle East, they don't need a lecture from Obama about Christianity. The fact of the matter is Obama is not doing anything effective or substantive to stop genocide in our time — Mark Levin

A number of laws that are said to protect citizens harkens back to "Jim Crow" era. — J.C. Phillips

That conclusion is inescapable, given the well-established evidence that voter-ID laws don't disenfranchise minorities or reduce minority voting, and in many instances enhance it, despite claims to the contrary by Mr. Holder and his allies. As more states adopt such laws, the left has railed against them with increasing fury, even invoking the specter of the Jim Crow era to describe electoral safeguards common to most nations, including in the Third World. — Edwin Meese

By 1945, a growing number of whites in the North had concluded that the Jim Crow system would have to be modified, if not entirely overthrown. This consensus was due to a number of factors, including the increased political power of blacks due to migration to the North and the growing membership and influence of the NAACP, particularly its highly successful legal campaign challenging Jim Crow laws in federal courts. Far more important in the view of many scholars, however, is the influence of World War II. The blatant contradiction between the country's opposition to the crimes of the Third Reich against European Jews and the continued existence of a racial caste system in the United States was proving embarrassing, severely damaging the nation's credibility as leader of the "free world. — Michelle Alexander

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness — Michelle Alexander