Jim Crow Quotes

“When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners--and wished them well--nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation... Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“Just what is a liberal?" asked Simple.

"Well, as nearly as I can tell, a liberal is a nice man who acts decently toward people, talks democratically, and often is democratic in his personal life, but does not stand up very well in action when some real social issue like Jim Crow comes up.”
― Langston Hughes, The Return of Simple

“Israel had advanced beyond the Jim Crow South and segregated not just the pools and the fountains, but the water itself.”
― Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message

“You can’t ‘get over’ something that is still happening. Which is why black Americans can’t ‘get over’ slavery or Jim Crow. It may be quite a while—likely past all of our lifetimes—before white people will be able to say ‘nigger’ without harming black people.”
― Ijeoma Oluo, So You Want to Talk About Race

“Being in servitude to the Anglo-Saxon race, I was not put into a "Jim Crow car," on our way to Rockaway, neither was I invited to ride through the streets on the top of trunks in a truck; but every where I found the same manifestations of that cruel prejudice, which so discourages the feelings, and represses the energies of the colored people.”
― Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

“I believe that there are four institutions in American history that have shaped our approach to race and justice but remain poorly understood. The first, of course, is slavery. This was followed by the reign of terror that shaped the lives of people of color following the collapse of Reconstruction until World War II.

....The third institution, "Jim Crow," is the legalized racial segregation and suppression of basic rights that defined the American apartheid era.

....The fourth institution is mass incarceration.”
― Bryan Stevenson, Just Mercy

“do the rosa parks
say no no

do the rosa parks
throw your hand in the air

do the rosa parks
say ... no no

do the rosa parks
tell them: that ain't fair”
― Nikki Giovanni, Acolytes

“Even when there was segregation there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us.”
― Rosa Parks

“On the train I had a lot of time to think. I thought how in the thirty years of my life I had seldom gotten on a train in America without being conscious of my color. In the South, there are Jim Crow cars and Negroes must ride separate from the whites, usually in a filthy antiquated coach next to the engine, getting all the smoke and bumps and dirt. In the South, we cannot buy sleeping car tickets. Such comforts are only for white folks. And in the North where segregated travel is not the law, colored people have, nevertheless, many difficulties. In auto buses they must take the seats in the rear, over the wheels. On the boats they must occupy the worst cabins. The ticket agents always say that all other accommodations are sold. On trains, if one sits down by a white person, the white person will sometimes get up, flinging back an insult at the Negro who has dared to take a seat beside him. Thus it is that in America, if you are yellow, brown, or black, you can never travel anywhere without being reminded of your color, and oft-times suffering great inconveniences.

I sat in the comfortable sleeping car on my first day out of Moscow and remembered many things about trips I had taken in America. I remembered how, once as a youngster going alone to see my father who was working in Mexico, I went into the dining car of the train to eat. I sat down at a table with a white man. The man looked at me and said, "You're a nigger, ain't you?" and left the table. It was beneath his dignity to eat with a Negro child. At St. Louis I went onto the station platform to buy a glass of milk. The clerk behind the counter said, “We don't serve niggers," and refused to sell me anything. As I grew older I learned to expect this often when traveling. So when I went South to lecture on my poetry at Negro universities, I carried my own food because I knew I could not go into the dining cars. Once from Washington to New Orleans, I lived all the way on the train on cold food. I remembered this miserable trip as I sat eating a hot dinner on the diner of the Moscow-Tashkent express.

Traveling South from New York, at Washington, the capital of our country, the official Jim Crow begins. There the conductor comes through the train and, if you are a Negro, touches you on the shoulder and says, "The last coach forward is the car for colored people." Then you must move your baggage and yourself up near the engine, because when the train crosses the Potomac River into Virginia, and the dome of the Capitol disappears, it is illegal any longer for white people and colored people to ride together. (Or to eat together, or sleep together, or in some places even to work together.) Now I am riding South from Moscow and am not Jim-Crowed, and none of the darker people on the train with me are Jim-Crowed, so I make a happy mental note in the back of my mind to write home to the Negro papers: "There is no Jim Crow on the trains of the Soviet Union.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Poets who write mostly about love, roses and moonlight, sunsets and snow, must lead a very quiet life. Seldom, I imagine, does their poetry get them into difficulties. Beauty and lyricism are really related to another world, to ivory towers, to your head in the clouds, feet floating off the earth. Unfortunately, having been born poor--and also colored--in Missouri, I was stuck in the mud from the beginning. Try as I might to float off into the clouds, poverty and Jim Crow would grab me by the heels, and right back on earth I would land.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“America was big and blighted in gamey spots by racial intolerance and violence. Visiting relatives in Georgia? Here are the safe routes around the sundown towns and cracker territories where you might not make it out alive, the towns and counties to be avoided if you valued your life.”
― Colson Whitehead, Harlem Shuffle

“It is as if we have reentered the past and are living in a second Nadir: It seems the rate of police killings now surpasses the rate of lynchings during the worst decades of the Jim Crow era. There was a lynching every four days in the early decades of the twentieth century. It’s been estimated that an African American is now killed by police every two to three days.”
― Jesmyn Ward, The Fire This Time: A New Generation Speaks About Race

“...Me, I do not want to go to no suburbans not even Brooklyn. But Joyce wants to integrate. She says America has got two cultures, which should not he divided as they now is, so let's leave Harlem."

"Don't you agree that Joyce is right?"

"White is right," said Simple, "so I have always heard. But I never did believe it. White folks do so much wrong! Not only do they mistreat me, but they mistreats themselves. Right now, all they got their minds on is shooting off rockets and sending up atom bombs and poisoning the air and fighting wars and Jim Crowing the universe."

"Why do you say 'Jim Crowing the universe'?" "Because I have not heard tell of no Negro astronaughts nowhere in space yet. This is serious, because if one of them white Southerners gets to the moon first, COLORED NOT ADMITTED signs will go up all over heaven as sure as God made little green apples, and Dixiecrats will be asking the man in the moon, 'Do you want your daughter to marry a Nigra?' Meanwhile, the N.A.A.C.P. will have to go to the Supreme Court, as usual, to get an edict for Negroes to even set foot on the moon. By that time, Roy Wilkins will be too old to make the trip, and me, too."

"But perhaps the Freedom Riders will go into orbit on their own," I said. "Or Harlem might vote Adam Powell into the Moon Congress.''

"One thing I know," said Simple, "is that Martin Luther King will pray himself up there. The moon must be a halfway stop on the way to Glory, and King will probably be arrested. I wonder if them Southerners will take police dogs to the moon?”
― Langston Hughes, The Return of Simple

“We drove across the Red Square past Lenin's Mausoleum and the towers and domes of the Kremlin--and stopped a block away at the Grand Hotel.

Our rooms were ready for us--clean and comfortable, with hot and cold water, homelike settees and deep roomy chairs. Courteous attendants were there, baths and elevator, a book shop and two restaurants. Everything that a hotel for white folks at home would have--except that, quite truthfully, there was no toilet paper. And no Jim Crow.

Of course, we knew that one of the basic principles of the Soviet Union is the end of all racial distinctions. That's the main reason we had come to Moscow.”
― Langston Hughes, Good Morning, Revolution: Uncollected Social Protest Writings

“Jim Crow wasn't nothing but slavery, wrapped up in a nice little gift card." -Rev. John Kennard”
― Jaha Nailah Avery, Those Who Saw the Sun: African American Oral Histories from the Jim Crow South

“In 1972, fewer than 350,000 people were being held in prisons and jails nationwide, compared with more than 2 million people today (10),”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Young Readers’ Edition: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“It was wrong. It was wrong to pay the same dime yet have to walk to the back of the bus. It was wrong to have to pass a "white" school to go to a "colored" school. It was wrong to have Colored and White signs. It was wrong that Emmett Till was murdered. It was wrong that the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church was dynamited. It was wrong that Medgar Evers was shot in the back and bled to death in his own driveway. And whatever was not right could be, if not corrected, then certainly reproved by people with kinder hearts, better minds and the courage to speak out for their beliefs.”
― Nikki Giovanni, Acolytes

“On one side of the tracks was the commercial center: the college, city hall, businesses, white residential neighborhoods-carefully kept that way, first by deliberate redlining and later by Jim Crow... Through the sixties, the city of Commerce was known as a "sundown town"- any Black person found of the streets after dark was in danger of being lynched. The only place where Black citizens were safe from the threat of white violence was also the only place Black people were legally allowed to reside: Norris Community, known fondly by younger generations as "the Hole".”
― Brittany K. Barnett, A Knock at Midnight: A Story of Hope, Justice, and Freedom

“I'm just as aware of the injustices done to the black man as anyone," the Dipper would explain years after. "I just don't believe that you help things by running around, saying how evil Whitey is. I figure I done my share - the restaurants I integrated in Kansas, the busloads of black kids I used to take to summer camp from Harlem, the contributions I make, in my name and money, to various black causes and programs. Just because I don't call a press conference every time I do something like that doesn't mean I am insensitive to the black man's plight.”
― Gary M. Pomerantz, Wilt, 1962: The Night of 100 Points and the Dawn of a New Era

“What you are about to read is the story of the first war on terror.

No ... wait.

This is actually the origin story of second-wave white supremacy known as "Jim Crow laws."

This is a war narrative. This is a horror story, but it's also a suspense thriller that ends in triumph. It also ends in tragedy. It's a true story about a fantastic myth. This is a narrative, nonfiction account of the all-American fairy tale of liberty and justice for all.

Behold, the untold story of the Great American Race War.

Before we begin, we shall introduce our hero.

The hero of this drama is Black people. All Black people. The free Blacks; the uncloaked maroons; the Black elite; the preachers and reverends; the doormen and doctors; the sharecroppers and soldiers—they are all protagonists in our epic adventure.

Spoiler alert: the hero of this story does not die.

Ever.

This hero is long-suffering but unkillable. Bloody and unbowed. In this story—and in all the subsequent sequels, now and forever—this hero almost never wins. But we still get to be the heroes of all true American stories simply because we are indestructible. Try as they might, we will never be extinguished.

Ever.”
― Michael Harriot, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“In particular, it does not record the deployment of the false rape accusation in the Jim Crow period as, in Ida B. Wells’s words, “an excuse to get rid of Negroes who were acquiring wealth and property and thus keep the race terrorized".”
― Amia Srinivasan, The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century

“Let’s show lots of love for Emmett Till
And fight against bigotry, racism, and hate
Let’s show lots of love for Emmett Till
So humanity can have a better fate”
― Aida Mandic, Turn The Tables

“And what was the cost of this Jim Crow? Not merely that the precious words "America" and "freedom" became suspect in the eyes of the world, but more than that. It cost us lives. Lives of white men, of Frenchmen, Russians and Chinese-because there were many battles in this war when replacements were needed. But the American rule of war was "No Negroes allowed on the front lines" until the 92d finally got there.
I listened to the Axis radio. Tokyo Rose said, and she quoted American sources, that Negroes were good enough to serve in the American Army, but they weren't good enough to pitch in the American Big League baseball. And they broadcast this not only to our own troops but also to the billion and a half colored peoples of the earth.”
― Oliver W. Harrington, Why I Left America and Other Essays

“...Jim Crow was the American equivalent of South African apartheid and the racial laws passed in Germany under the Nazi regime of the 1930s. And these similarities are not merely coincidental. Historians have uncovered growing evidence showing that racist parties around the world, including in Nazi Germany, were inspired and guided by the example of American Jim Crow.”
― Alvin Hall, Driving the Green Book: A Road Trip Through the Living History of Black Resistance

“It is also apparent, especially to those familiar with the old order, that all these improvements have evolved from a foundation of social relations and class power built around the architecture of white supremacy. Vestiges of that foundation remain visible within current arrangements, and it can seem commonsensical, therefore, to suspect that it continues to shape the limits of the new structures of routine life. That is one reason, for example, that discussions of the relation between race and life chances in the contemporary United States gravitate so easily toward allusion to the explicit racial hierarchies that defined the Jim Crow era as an alternative to deep examination of the discrete processes that ground and reproduce inequality in the present. But commonsense rests on projection of the familiar and thereby stresses continuity over change. Unquestioned power and deference persist in the region, but their connection to race is no longer straightforward or easily predictable. The tendency to mistake superficially familiar imagery for actual continuity threatens to obscure how the present differs most meaningfully from the past.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“The segregationist order was never stable. It was only the white southern myth of timeless tradition, a myth installed partly at gunpoint as an element of consolidation of ruling class power, that gave it the appearance of solidity. Retracing that history, which contained and shaped but generally lies beyond the insight that can be drawn from personal experience, is necessary to fill in the picture of what the Jim Crow South was. However, because of the ways the past lives imagistically so near the surface of the present in the South, moments occasionally erupt that encourage, perhaps demand, critical reflection on the region's actual history and that history's relation to social and political life today.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“I have often pointed out to students that the Jim Crow order had a specific and relatively brief life span. It was not completely consolidated until the end of the first decade of the twentieth century. All of my grandparents were fully sentient and aware of their social environments, if not full adults, before the order's features took definite shape and assumed the form of normal politics and everyday life. And during the roughly three decades or so between the regime's consolidation and its slow, painful unraveling, the system was placed under considerable strain and reorganized internally by the Great Migration of black people out of the South or to cities within it, the Great Depression and the New Deal, the emergence of the industrial unions of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the war. And in large and small ways, black people never stopped challenging its boundaries and constraints–from the struggle over its imposition to its eventual defeat.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“What seem to be vestiges of the Jim Crow world in a sense are just that. But passage of the old order's segregationist trappings throws into relief the deeper reality that what appeared and was experienced as racial hierarchy was also class hierarchy. Now blacks occupy positions in the socioeconomic order previously available only to whites, and whites occupy those previously identified with blacks. And the dynamics of superordination and subordination, patterns of appropriation and distribution, and dominant understandings of which material interests should drive policy remain much as they were.

This underscores the point that the core of the Jim Crow order was a class system rooted in employment and production relations that were imposed, stabilized, regulated and naturalized through a regime of white supremacist law, practice, custom, rhetoric, and ideology. Defeating the white supremacist regime was a tremendous victory for social justice and egalitarian interests. At the same time, that victory left the undergirding class system untouched and in practical terms affirmed it. That is the source of that bizarre sensation I felt in the region a generation after the defeat of Jim Crow. The larger takeaway from this reality is that a simple racism/anti-racism framework isn't adequate for making sense of the segregation era, and it certainly isn't up to the task of interpreting what has succeeded it or challenging the forms of inequality and injustice that persist.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“It is bemusing to observe when formative periods of one's past become grist for scholarly, ideological, and casual interpretation and debate and are constructed and reconstructed from the standpoint of current concerns and debates. That's also inevitable, on one level what history is. A danger, however, is that, when reckoning with the past becomes too much like an allegory, its nuances and contingencies, its essential open-endedness, can disappear. Then history can become either a narrative of inevitable, progressive unfolding to the present or, worse, a tendentious assertion that nothing has ever changed, and both divesting the past of its discrete foreignness and contingency or reducing it to the warm-up act for the present are handmaidens of ruling class power. The danger of that tendency is especially great in moments of ruling class triumphalism such as this one.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr., The South: Jim Crow and Its Afterlives

“Longevity can be a source of corrective optimism. I recall an occasion early in the George W. Bush presidency when my friend and former physician, Quentin Young, was confronted at a talk by a medical student who lamented that she couldn't imagine being able to win any progressive objectives because the right had been in power all her conscious life. Quentin, who was then about eighty years old, responded that a virtue of having lived as long as he had was that he knew that almost no one, no matter how far left or how optimistic, standing in 1950 would have predicted that the back of the Jim Crow system would be broken within fifteen years. He was correct, and that's a good lesson for us all to keep in mind in this most perilous time in this country and the world.”
― Adolph L. Reed Jr.