Jim Crow Quotes

• We have defeated Jim Crow, but now we have to deal with his son, James Crow Jr., esquire.

  Al Sharpton

  Son, Crow, Defeated

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• We have not ended racial caste in America, we have merely redesigned it.

  Michelle Alexander

  America, Felons, Mass Incarceration

  "A Bitter Harvest: California, Marijuana, and the New Jim Crow". "Bringing Down the New Jim Crow" with Chris Moore-Backman, www.prx.org. November 15, 2011.

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• Jim Crow is alive and it's dressed in a Brooks Brothers suit, my friend, instead of a white robe.

  Myrlie Evers-Williams

  Brother, White, Crow

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• Jim Crow was king... and I heard a game in which Jackie Robinson was playing, and I felt pride in being alive

  Lou Brock

  Sports, Kings, Pride

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• If a person is homosexual by nature - that is, if one's sexuality is as intrinsic a part of one's identity as gender or skin color - then society can no more deny a gay person access to the secular rights and religious sacraments because of his homosexuality than it can reinstate Jim Crow.

  Jon Meacham

  Religious, Gay, Rights

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• 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

  Believe, School, Jim Crow Laws

  "Anna Deavere Smith: Let Me Down Easy". Interview with Steve Mirsky, www.scientificamerican.com. December 20, 2010.

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• The black family survived centuries of slavery and generations of Jim Crow, but it has disintegrated in the wake of the liberals' expansion of the welfare state.

  Thomas Sowell

  Black, Crow, Expansion

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• Out of abysses of Illiteracy, Through labyrinths of Lies, Across wastelands of Disease . . . We advance Out of dead-ends of Poverty, Through wilderness of Superstition, Across barricades of Jim Crowism . . . We advance.

  Melvin B. Tolson

  Lying, Labyrinth, Deceit

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• Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.

  Ta-Nehisi Coates

  Years, Two, America

  "The Case for Reparations". www.theatlantic.com.

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• The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.

  Michelle Alexander

  Jim Crow Laws, Age, Mass Incarceration

  "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness". Book by Michelle Alexander, January 5, 2010.

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• Once you're labeled a felon, the old forms of discrimination - employment discrimination, housing discrimination, denial of the right to vote, denial of educational opportunity, denial of food stamps and other public benefits, and exclusion from jury service - are suddenly legal. As a criminal, you have scarcely more rights, and largely less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

  Michelle Alexander

  Educational, Men, Opportunity

  "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness". Book by Michelle Alexander, January 5, 2010.

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• 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

  Country, Government, Jim Crow Laws

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• The fate of millions of people—indeed the future of the black community itself—may depend on the willingness of those who care about racial justice to re-examine their basic assumptions about the role of the criminal justice system in our society.

  Michelle Alexander

  Fate, People, Justice

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.16, The New Press

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• And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

  Barack Obama

  Country, Horse, Home

  Barack Obama's Speech at National Prayer Breakfast, obamawhitehouse.archives.gov. February 5, 2015.

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• One of the points in which I was especially interested was the Jim Crow regulations, that is, the system of separation of the races in street cars and railroad trains.

  Ray Stannard Baker

  Race, Car, Crow

  Ray Stannard Baker (1908). “Following the Color Line: An Account of Negro Citizenship in the American Democracy”

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• That's one of the biggest losses, I think, to African American families, is that people, once they left, they turned away from the South. They didn't look back, and they often didn't tell their children about it. They didn't want to talk about it. It was too painful, what they'd gone through and the caste system of the South, which was Jim Crow.

  Isabel Wilkerson

  Children, Loss, Thinking

  "Journalist Isabel Wilkerson". "Tavis Smiley", www.pbs.org. December 23, 2010.

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• As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.

  Jon Meacham

  Dog, Epic, Fire

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• Raised by an irresponsible mother during the Great Depression in the Jim Crow south, my father was on his own from the age of 13.

  Larry Elder

  Mother, Father, Crow

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• In our state, I'm really proud of the fact that the ones who overturned Jim Crow in Kentucky were Republicans fighting against an entirely unified Democrat Party. So I am proud to be Republican. I can't imagine being anything else.

  Rand Paul

  Party, Fighting, Kentucky

  "Rand Paul Is Proud Of The GOP’s Tradition Of Supporting ‘Civil Rights’" by Sarah Fruchtnicht, www.opposingviews.com. October 13, 2013.

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• It was the biggest suppression of voting rights in our country's history since Jim Crow. And the thread of race runs from the beginning to the end of my book.

  Sidney Blumenthal

  Running, Country, Book

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• I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.

  Rita Dove

  Kings, Black And White, Rights

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• The Journey of Reconciliation was organized not only to devise techniques for eliminating Jim Crow in travel, but also as a training ground for similar peaceful projects against discrimination in such major areas as employment and in the armed services.

  Bayard Rustin

  Journey, Peaceful, Crow

  Bayard Rustin (2003). “Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin”, p.81, Simon and Schuster

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• Since the nation's founding, African Americans repeatedly have been controlled through institutions such as slavery and Jim Crow, which appear to die, but then are reborn in new form, tailored to the needs and constraints of the time.

  Michelle Alexander

  African American, Crow, Needs

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.21, The New Press

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• Poor minorities live in a new age of Jim Crow, one in which the ravages of segregation, racism, poverty and dashed hopes are amplified by the forces of privatization, financialization, militarization and criminalization, fashioning a new architecture of punishment, massive human suffering and authoritarianism.

  Henry Giroux

  Punishment, Racism, Crow

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• More than 2 million people found themselves behind bars at the turn of the twenty-first century, and millions more were relegated to the margins of mainstream society, banished to a political and social space not unlike Jim Crow, where discrimination in employment, housing, and access to education was perfectly legal, and where they could be denied the right to vote.

  Michelle Alexander

  Space, Mainstream Society, Racism

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.58, The New Press

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