“The institution of slavery was, for a quarter millennium, the conversion of human beings into currency, into machines who existed solely for the profit of their owners, to be worked as long as the owners desired, who had no rights… — Isabel Wilkerson Copy Share Image
“That one over this is the one for the use of the white people,” Judge Amistead Jones said. “Not that I am a stickler about such matters, but if there are to be different Bibles kept for the races, then you must not get them mixed that way. Have a different place for them, and keep them there. Then such… — Isabel Wilkerson Copy Share
“...they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement...” — Isabel Wilkerson Copy Share Image
Many immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn't want to… — Isabel Wilkerson Copy Share Image
“Many of the people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things, tell them what happened and why they left and how they and all this blood kin came to be in this northern city or western suburb or why they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement,… — Isabel Wilkerson Copy Share
“Fifteen thousand men, women, and children gathered to watch eighteen-year-old Jesse Washington as he was burned alive in Waco, Texas, in May 1916. The… — Isabel Wilkerson Copy Share Image
It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me. — Isabel Wilkerson Copy Share Image
Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and west are… — Isabel Wilkerson Copy Share Image
There were colored and white waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor's offices to the bus stations, as people may already know. But there were actually colored windows at the post office in, for example, Pensacola, Florida. And there were white and colored telephone booths in Oklahoma. And there were separate windows where white people and black people would go to get… — Isabel Wilkerson Copy Share
“I don’t see one white person in this block selling drugs. They got the nerve to be mad at the blue-eyed devil. You don’t… — Isabel Wilkerson Copy Share Image
“That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary —a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have. — DANIEL… — Isabel Wilkerson Copy Share Image
“The reality was that Jim Crow filtered through the economy, north and south, and pressed down on poor and working-class people of all races.” — Isabel Wilkerson Copy Share Image
I mean my mother migrated from Georgia -Rome, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., where she then met my father, who was a Tuskegee Airman who was from Southern Virginia. They migrated to Washington and I wouldn't even exist if it were not for that migration. And I brought her back to Georgia, both my parents, actually. — Isabel Wilkerson Copy Share
