Quotes About Race

That all men should be brothers is the dream of people who have no brothers.

— Charles Chincholl

America is God’s Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and re-forming!

— Israel Zangwill

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

When this happens, when we let it ring, we will speed the day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, we’re free at last.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

Just being Negro doesn’t qualify you to understand the race situation any more than being sick makes you an expert on medicine.

— Dick Gregory

Be nice to whites, they need you to rediscover their humanity.

— Archbishop Desmond Tutu

After four hundred years of slave labor, we have some back pay coming.

— Malcolm X

Apartheid is and insult to God and man whom God dignifies.

— Archbishop Robert Runcie

Everybody’s colored or else you wouldn’t be able to see them.

— Captain Beefheart

Every man has pride of race, and under appropriate circumstances when the rights of others, his equals before the law, are not to be affected, it is his privilege to express such pride and to take such action based upon it as to him seems proper...Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.

— John Marshall Harlan

Men are not superior by reason of the accidents of race or color.  They are superior who have the best heart — the best brain.

— Robert G. Ingersoll

We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

After all, there is but one race — humanity.

— George Moore

Morality knows nothing of geographical boundaries or distinctions of race.

— Herbert Spencer

The difference of race is one of the reasons why I fear war may always exist; because race implies difference, difference implies superiority, and superiority leads to predominance.

— Benjamin Disraeli

I want to be the white man’s brother, not his brother-in-law.

— Martin Luther King, Jr. (attrib.)

I believe the life of the Negro race has ben a life of tragedy, of injustice, of oppression.  The law has made him equal, but man has not.

— Charles S. Darrow

Though the colored man is no longer subject to be bought and sold, he is still surrounded by and adverse sentiment which fetters all his movements.  In his downward course, he meets with no resistance, but his course upward is resisted at every stop of his progress.

— Frederick Douglass

There are no “white” or “colored” signs on the foxholes or graveyards of battle.

— John F. Kennedy

I have a dream that one day in the red hills of Georgia, sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave-owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

We have to prove beyond the shadow of a doubt that it is talent and training, not color, that makes a ballet dancer.

— Arthur Mitchell

Black art has always existed.  It just hasn’t been looked for in the right places.

— Romare Bearden

Human law may know no distinction among men in respect of rights, but human practice may.

— Frederick Douglass

The color of the skin is in no way connected with strength of the mind or intellectual powers...

— Benjamin Banneker

We [blacks] wish to plead our own cause.  Too long have others spoken for us.

— John Browne Russwurm

It was asserted that we were “a ragged set crying for liberty.” I reply to it, the whites have so long and so loudly proclaimed the theme of equal rights and privileges that our souls have caught the flame, ragged as we are.

— Maria W. Stewart

Black men, don’t be ashamed to show your colors, and to own them.

— William Wells Brown

The race problem is a moral one...Its solution will come especially from the domain of principles.  Like all the other great battles of humanity, it is to be fought out with the weapons of truth.

— Alexander Crummell

The inspiration of the race is the race.

— Edward Wilmot Blyden

A white woman has one handicap to overcome: that of sex.  I have two — both sex and race.

— Mary Church Terrell

No race can speak for another or give utterance to its striving goal.

— Mary Church Terrell

Pride of race is the antidote to prejudice.

— Arthur Alfonso Schomburg

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, “There lived a great people — a black people — who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.”

— Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mumbling obeisance to the abhorrence of apartheid [is] like those lapsed believers who cross themselves when entering a church.

— Nadine Gordimer

I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny, and I say segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.

— George C. Wallace