Quotes & Sayings About Segregated Schools

My parents lived in a poor rural community on the Eastern Shore, and schools were still segregated. And I remember when lawyers came into our community to open up the public schools to black kids. — Bryan Stevenson

I think a lot of people don't have any idea of how deeply segregated our schools have become all over again. Most textbooks are not honest in what they teach our high school students. — Jonathan Kozol

And public transportation applied economic pressure. Freedom Riders - African Americans and whites - took bus trips throughout the South to test federal laws that banned segregation in interstate transportation. Black students had enrolled in segregated schools such as Central High in Little Rock, Arkansas, and the University of Alabama. Picketing, protest marches, and demonstrations made headlines. Civil rights workers carried out programs for voter education and registration. The goal was — Christopher Paul Curtis

Growing up in Augusta in such a protected and loving community is something that I really enjoy talking about. I love talking about - even though I grew up, of course, in the time of segregated schools: Brown vs. Board of Education came along after I was already in first grade. — Jessye Norman

I saw how many people were poor and how many kids my age went to school hungry in the morning, which I don't think most of my contemporaries in racially segregated schools in the South thought very much about at the time. — Charles Kuralt

There's only one way America's neighborhoods will begin to integrate: people have to want it more than vested public and corporate interests are opposed to it. And more people should want it. Mixed-race, mixed-income housing is a product we need to market. It's the only real solution to segregated schools, for one. (140) — Tanner Colby

Cincinnati like so many other cities, we know that so many of our schools, when it comes to public schools, are still de facto segregated racially. It has to do with residential segregation. It has to do with James Crow, Jr., which is at work, de facto rather than legally so that some of the integration is taking place among more and more well-to-do. — Cornel West

Schools are no longer legally segregated, but because of residential patterns, housing discrimination, economic disparities and long-held custom, they most emphatically are in reality. — Bob Herbert

At present, black children are more segregated in their public schools than at any time since 1968. In the inner-city schools I visit, minority children typically represent 95 percent to 99 percent of class enrollment. — Jonathan Kozol

Much of what I do now stems from my rage at segregation and discrimination. I can't stand to see children not able to do anything, anybody not able to do what they can do. The daily lessons of exclusion, having hand-me-down books in schools, of seeing ambulances turn away and not give health care for people lying in the streets who are migrant workers. Everything I do today stems from that segregated existence. — Marian Wright Edelman

Michelle Alexander's brave and bold new book paints a haunting picture in which dreary felon garb, post-prison joblessness, and loss of voting rights now do the stigmatizing work once done by colored-only water fountains and legally segregated schools. With dazzling candor, Alexander argues that we all pay the cost of the new Jim Crow. — Lani Guinier

Let us be dissatisfied until America will no longer have high blood pressure of creeds and an anemia of deeds. Let us be dissatisfied until the tragic walls that separate the outer city of wealth and comfort from the inner city of poverty and despair shall be crushed by the battering rams of the fires of justice. Let us be dissatisfied until they who live on the outskirts of Hope are brought into the metropolis of daily security. Let us be dissatisfied until slums are cast into the junk heap of history and every family will live in a decent, sanitary home. Let us be dissatisfied until the dark yesterdays of segregated schools will be
transformed into the bright tomorrows of quality integrated education. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Segregated schools. Children are educated, again often from a very early age, with members of a religious in-group and seperately from children whose families adhere to other religions. — Richard Dawkins

Our political establishment refuses to use the word 'segregated.' They call the schools diverse, which means half black, half Hispanic, and maybe two white kids and three Asians. 'Diverse' has become a synonym for 'segregated.' — Jonathan Kozol

Anti-black racism is in the culture. It's in our laws, in our advertisements, in our friendships, in our segregated cities, in our schools, in our Congress, in our scientific experiments, in our language, on the Internet, in our bodies no matter our race, in our communities, and, perhaps most devastatingly, in our justice system. — Claudia Rankine

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 was born black, I attended all Negro schools including college, I grew up in the segregated South during Jim Crow. If anybody knows a racist, I do. Pat Buchanan ain't no racist. — Ezola B. Foster

Unfortunately, most of the major denominations still practice segregation in local churches, hospitals, schools, and other church institutions. It is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o'clock on Sunday morning, the same hour when many are standing to sing: In Christ There Is No East Nor West. — Martin Luther King Jr.

Our nation's oldest sin and deepest crime is the isolation of minority children - black children, in particular - in schools that are not only segregated but shamefully unequal. — Jonathan Kozol

Local churches are ten times more segregated than the neighborhoods they are in and they are twenty times more segregated than the schools than the nearby schools. — Derwin L. Gray

You know if we were to look back and how we were in 1955 living in Jim Crow, living in segregation, living in segregated schools, it's hard to believe that it was America, but it really was. — Anna Deavere Smith

I went to public schools, and while Gary was, like most American cities, racially segregated, it was at least socially integrated - a cross section of children from families of all walks of life. — Joseph Stiglitz

Despite the amazing diversity we're blessed with in this country, schools are still in large part segregated because of economic disparity. Sports are one of the few areas where kids are really given the opportunity to interact with those of different races and religions. — Steve Kerr

The segregated schools of today are arguably no more equal than the segregated schools of the past. — Ed Markey