Jim Crow Quotes - Page 3

• There are more African Americans under correctional control, in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850 a decade before the civil war began.

  Michelle Alexander

  War, Jail, African American

  "The mass incarceration of the Black community: an interview with Michelle Alexander, author of ‘The New Jim Crow’". Interview with Minister of Information JR Valrey, sfbayview.com. April 4, 2012.

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• People talk about Jim Crow as if it's dead. Jim Crow isn't gone. It's adjusted. Look at the disproportionate sentences meted out to blacks caught up in the criminal justice system. There's a problem when people profit from putting and keeping African Americans in prison. We need to do a better job as a nation understanding the real values the country's built upon in terms of fairness, equality and equal opportunity.

  Aldis Hodge

  Real, Opportunity, People

  Source: www.theskanner.com

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• I have much more confidence in my ability, or any president or any leader's ability, to mobilize the American people around a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment to help every child in poverty in this country than I am in being able to mobilize the country around providing a benefit specific to African Americans as a consequence of slavery and Jim Crow.

  Barack Obama

  Country, Children, People

  Source: www.theatlantic.com

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• In studying food, you embrace everything. Food exposes the long, complex history of the South - slavery, Jim Crow segregation, class struggle, extreme hunger, sexism, and disenfranchisement. These issues are revealed through food encounters, and they contrast this with the pleasure and the inventiveness of Southern cuisine. Food is always at the heart of daily life in the South.

  Marcie Cohen Ferris

  Struggle, Heart, Long

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• Whether we want to own up to it or not, the welfare state has done what Jim Crow, gross discrimination and poverty could not have done. It has contributed to the breakdown of the black family structure and has helped establish a set of values alien to traditional values of high moral standards, hard work and achievement.

  Walter E. Williams

  Hard Work, Achievement, Crow

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• The patter of their feet as they walk through Jim Crow barriers to attend school is the thunder of the marching men of Joshua, and the world rocks beneath their tread.

  Paul Robeson

  School, Men, Rocks

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• I don’t believe it is possible to transcend race in this country. Race is a factor in this society. The legacy of Jim Crow and slavery has not gone away. It is not an accident that African-Americans experience high crime rates, are poor, and have less wealth. It is a direct result of our racial history.

  Barack Obama

  Country, Believe, Race

  "On the Road with Barack Obama". www.essence.com. December, 16, 2009.

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• I actually believe that some residue of discrimination would lessen, because it's my view that there is a certain percentage of the white population that stereotypes and makes assumptions about African Americans because they don't inject the history of slavery and Jim Crow into current incarceration rates, or crime rates, or poverty rates, or what have you.

  Barack Obama

  Believe, Views, White

  Source: www.theatlantic.com

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• Black women, historically, have been doubly victimized by the twin immoralities of Jim Crow and Jane Crow. ... Black women, faced with these dual barriers, have often found that sex bias is more formidable than racial bias.

  Pauli Murray

  Sex, Black, Crow

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• For the rest of their lives, [black men] can be denied the right to vote, automatically excluded from juries, and legally discriminated against in employment, housing, access to education and public benefits. So many of the old forms of discrimination that we supposedly left behind during the Jim Crow era are suddenly legal again once you've been branded a felon.

  Michelle Alexander

  Men, Black, Crow

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I wouldn't vote against getting rid of the Jim Crow laws.

  Ron Paul

  Jim Crow Laws, Vote, Law

  "Hardball" with Chris Matthews, www.nbcnews.com. May 8, 2009.

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• 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

  Book, School, Loss

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• You cannot be responsible for Jim Crow. You can not be responsible for racism. This is much more a problem for the person exercising racism.You are confronted with the reality of racism when you go in the streets, when the eyes of others come upon you. [James] Baldwin goes back with you to all the experiences you went through and gives a name to them, and explains why it is like this.

  Raoul Peck

  Eye, Exercise, Reality

  "James Baldwin Was Never Your Negro". Interview With Edwin Rios, www.motherjones.com. February 3, 2017.

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• I think the important thing to understand first and foremost about Michael Jackson is that he was the international emblem of the African American blues spiritual impulse that goes back through slavery - Jim Crow, Jane Crow, up to the present moment, through a Louis Armstrong, through a Ma Rainey, through a Bessie Smith, all the way to John Coltrane, Aretha Franklin and Nina Simone.

  Cornel West

  Spiritual, Thinking, African American

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• (F)or 50 years, the well-meaning leftist agenda has been able to do to blacks what Jim Crow and harsh discrimination could never have done: family breakdown, illegitimacy and low academic achievement.

  Walter E. Williams

  Years, Achievement, Crow

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• The welfare state has done to Black Americans what slavery (and Jim Crow and racism) could not have done. . .break up the black family. Today, just slightly over 30 percent of black kids live in two-parent families. Historically, from the 1870s on. . . 75-90 percent of black kids lived in two-parent families.

  John Stossel

  Kids, Two, Racism

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• The government can back up its tastes and beliefs with the police power. That is why it cannot be permitted tastes and beliefs. Most emphatically, it cannot be permitted to define one group as being privileged over another group of people. It was wrong in the days of Jim Crow; it is wrong in the days of affirmative action.

  Charles A. Murray

  Government, People, Police

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• So more and more black folk tend to be well-adjusted to [Barack] Obama's presidency, but does that mean they're well-adjusted to injustice? Because we don't hear our president talking about the new Jim Crow, the prison-industrial complex.

  Cornel West

  Mean, Talking, Crow

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• In the pioneer West Whitopias, immigration tended to be the dominant social and racial issue. In Forsyth County, Georgia, immigration is still an issue, but because you have that complicated history of the Trail of Tears and slavery and Jim Crow, the Whitopia has a different flavor.

  Richard Benjamin

  Issues, Crow, Tears

  Source: www.motherjones.com

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• 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

  Christian, Jim Crow Laws, Black

  "Mark Levin: Obama 'A Nihilist, A Narcissist And An Extremist;" Warns "We Are Going To Get Hit Again'". www.realclearpolitics.com. February 05, 2015.

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• The new racism, like God, works in mysterious ways and is quite effective in maintaining white privilege. For example, instead of saying as they used to say during the Jim Crow era that they do not want us as neighbors, they say things nowadays such as 'I am concerned about crime, property values and schools.'

  Eduardo Bonilla-Silva

  School, White Privilege, Racism

  "The new threat: 'Racism without racists'". Interview with John Blake, www.cnn.com. November 27, 2014.

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• I think the ties to slavery and the terrible tragedy that followed the Civil War with Jim Crow and racial violence is closely linked to the Confederate flag.

  William R. Ferris

  War, Thinking, Ties

  "Confederate Flag Debate Symbolizes Rapid Change In The South". "All Things Considered" with Rachel Martin, www.npr.org. June 23, 2015.

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• 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

  Race, Jim Crow Laws, Groups

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.13, The New Press

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• Arguably the most important parallel between mass incarceration and Jim Crow is that both have served to define the meaning and significance of race in America. Indeed, a primary function of any racial caste system is to define the meaning of race in its time. Slavery defined what it meant to be black (a slave), and Jim Crow defined what it meant to be black (a second-class citizen). Today mass incarceration defines the meaning of blackness in America: black people, especially black men, are criminals. That is what it means to be black.

  Michelle Alexander

  Mean, Men, America

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

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• The United States imprisons a larger percentage of its black population than South Africa did at the height of apartheid. In Washington, D.C., our nation’s capitol, it is estimated that three out of four young black men (and nearly all those in the poorest neighborhoods) can expect to serve time in prison.

  Michelle Alexander

  Men, Black, United States

  Michelle Alexander (2013). “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness”, p.6, The New Press

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