I grew up in the South under segregation. So, I know what terrorism feels like - when your father could be taken out in the middle of the night and lynched just because he didn't look like he was in an obeying frame of mind when a white person said something he must do. I mean, that's terrorism, too.
Alice Walker
My family was a poor farming family, and we lived under absolute segregation.
The demands of the Civil Rights era weren't limited to voting rights - they strove for an end to segregation in all aspects of life, including housing, employment, and public accommodations.
Alicia Garza
There was an email forwarded to me from a first-grade teacher, and she said she was teaching them civil rights for MLK weekend, and a little first-grader stood up, and he said, 'I can explain segregation,' and proceeded to explain all the scenes from 'Hidden Figures.' And I died because that's everything.
Allison Schroeder
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
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
Oh, Diane Nash deserves her own film. Diane Nash is a freedom fighter who is still alive and kicking. She was one of the leaders of the desegregation of Nashville, basically. She was a student at Fisk University who was one of the founding members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
Ava DuVernay
Segregation is not exclusion.
Ayelet Shaked
Our religious police has the most dangerous effect on society - the segregation of genders, putting the wrong ideas in the heads of men and women, producing psychological diseases that never existed in our country before, like fanatacism.
Basmah bint Saud
The organizers and perpetuators of segregation are as much the enemy of America as any foreign invader.
Bayard Rustin
We demand that segregation be ended in every school district in the year 1963! We demand that we have effective civil rights legislation - no compromise, no filibuster - and that include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, FEPC and the right to vote.
I am an opponent of war and of war preparations and an opponent of universal military training and conscription; but entirely apart from that issue, I hold that segregation in any part of the body politic is an act of slavery and an act of war.
Many well-meaning intelligent people have argued since the May 17, 1954, decision of the United States Supreme Court outlawing segregation in the public schools that communication between the races has broken down.
Benjamin E. Mays
So many white people don't want to talk about race; it's uncomfortable. Many reason that slavery happened more than a century ago, and people alive today had nothing to do with it. But the particulars of these stories, from slavery to segregation to civil rights and mass incarceration, are at the marrow of life in America today.
Beth Macy
I come up in a segregated 1943 atmosphere of segregation.
Bill Duke
From slavery to segregation, we remember that America did not always live up to its ideals. In fact, we often fell far short of them. But we also learned that fundamental to our national character is the drive to live out the true meaning of our creed.
Bill Frist
There is no scriptural basis for segregation.
Billy Graham
Being so closely related to the South, barbecue was part of segregation and helped defeat it.
Bobby Seale
While housing discrimination and segregation in 2005 still affect millions of people, that's not the way it has to be. Some things can change and should.
Bruce Hornsby
There was never a time you could get the majority of people in Alabama or Mississippi, or even southern Delaware, to vote to end segregation. What changed things was the rule of law, the courts. Brown v. Board of Education was ushered in by a movement, but it was a legal decision.
Bryan Stevenson
We didn't have any segregation at the Cotton Club. No. The Cotton Club was wide open, it was free.
Everybody did something. It was very entertaining. We had a lot of fun. Lot of fun. And there was no segregation, that I could see. I never saw any.
We do not show the Negro how to overcome segregation, but we teach him how to accept it as final and just.
And thus goes segregation which is the most far-reaching development in the history of the Negro since the enslavement of the race.
When it comes to discrimination, Americans pride ourselves on how far we've come. Racial segregation is history. Explicit sex discrimination is banned. Same-sex marriage is the law of the land. But amidst all the progress, the male-female wage gap persists, and it's big.
As a matter of history, the Fourteenth Amendment was not understood to ban segregation on the basis of race.
I never knew about racial segregation until Martin Luther King.
I think segregation is bad, I think it's wrong, it's immoral. I'd fight against it with every breath in my body, but you don't need to sit next to a white person to learn how to read and write. The NAACP needs to say that.
Back then, as a teenager, I kept thinking, why don't the adults around here just say something? Say it so they know we don't accept segregation? I knew then and I know now that, when it comes to justice, there's no easy way to get it. You can't sugarcoat it. You have to take a stand and say, 'This is not right.'
There was segregation everywhere. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn't even go into the same restaurants.
Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all.
The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December 1955, and by 1956 NAACP leaders came to me and asked me to be part of a lawsuit they wanted to file on my behalf and that of three other women, to challenge segregation on public buses.
The social science on the impact of desegregation is clear. Researchers have consistently found that students in integrated schools - irrespective of ethnicity, race, or social class - are more likely to make academic gains in mathematics, reading, and often science than they are in segregated ones.
School desegregation is associated with higher graduation rates, greater employability, higher earnings, and decreased rates of incarceration.
Segregation was wrong when it was forced by white people, and I believe it is still wrong when it is requested by black people.
We should not forget that in the '60s, George Wallace's motto was 'segregation forever,' and that he did nothing to deter bombings and other acts of violence and, by his actions, condoned them.
My parents were 30 years older than I was, and my parents had my brother and I ten years apart. My parents grew up in segregation, and they both lived in all-black neighborhoods and grew up with large black families. I didn't have any of that, and I didn't understand feeling so differently and being treated so differently.
We're now segregating our schools based on economics; we're segregating our schools based on where a child's parents live. And it has the same corrosive effect of destroying people's opportunity as racial segregation did.
When I was growing up, our nation was partitioned: Blacks were segregated by law in the South and largely by custom in the North, though it, too, had segregation laws. Our best universities had quota systems. Many white communities had real estate covenants to keep nonwhites out.
The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.
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.
Segregation was a burden for many blacks, because the end of the civil war and the amendments added to the constitution elevated expectations beyond reality in some respects.
Antoine 'Fats' Domino was a 1950s rock n' roll pioneer, a larger-than-life New Orleans figure, and a role model for the African-American community in a time of deep segregation.
There should be no segregation. Everyone should be united, and everyone should be seen as equals.
Our courts' decisions do not permeate the public consciousness - we have no equivalent of the Brown v Board of Education ruling which outlawed racial segregation, or of Roe v Wade, which enshrined a woman's right to choose not just into law but into the public imagination as well.
In the end no segregationist scheme has withstood the force of a simple idea: equality under law.
Attacking school segregation requires all hands on deck. We in the charter sector must move beyond our traditional comfort zone, serving disadvantaged students, and meet the demands of parents who have other high quality options.
I think everyone should - can share whatever they wish when their heart is touched and they want to spread more positivity rather than segregation and separation in this world.
I'd spend every summer in Longview on my grandfather's farm. It was a tiny little town divided by a river, which was the segregation line: that side white, this side black. And meanwhile, I lived in Compton - basically, another whole world sealed into 10 square blocks. It's interesting how insular an environment can be.
Some people criticize the faithful for getting involved in politics, but it's important to remember that down through the centuries, people motivated by their faith have done many important things. Martin Luther King Jr. - motivated by his faith - brought about an end to segregation in our country.
