Isabel Wilkerson

“That one over this is the one for the use of the white people,” Judge Amistead Jones said. “Not that I am…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“...they speak like melted butter and their children speak like footsteps on pavement...”

— Isabel Wilkerson

Many immigrants do not talk about what they endured back home. They were fleeing that world, and when they left they didn't…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“Many of the people who left the South never exactly sat their children down to tell them these things, tell them what…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“Fifteen thousand men, women, and children gathered to watch eighteen-year-old Jesse Washington as he was burned alive in Waco, Texas, in May…

— Isabel Wilkerson

It occurred to me that no matter where I lived, geography could not save me.

— Isabel Wilkerson

Well, I'm a daughter of the great migration as, really, the majority of African Americans that you meet in the north and…

— Isabel Wilkerson

There were colored and white waiting rooms everywhere, from doctor's offices to the bus stations, as people may already know. But there…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“I don’t see one white person in this block selling drugs. They got the nerve to be mad at the blue-eyed devil.…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“That the Negro American has survived at all is extraordinary —a lesser people might simply have died out, as indeed others have.…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“The reality was that Jim Crow filtered through the economy, north and south, and pressed down on poor and working-class people of…

— Isabel Wilkerson

I mean my mother migrated from Georgia -Rome, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., where she then met my father, who was a Tuskegee…

— Isabel Wilkerson

You must leave this world a better place than it would have been if you had not existed.

— Isabel Wilkerson

“County supervisors relented only after losing their case in the U.S. Supreme Court, choosing finally to reopen the schools rather than face…

— Isabel Wilkerson

My parents sent me to a school across town, an integrated school, where I had the chance to meet and grow up…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“The story describes an incident during the trial of a black schoolteacher accused of disposing of a mule on which there was…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“They fly from the land: W. H. Stillwell, “Exode,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, March 12, 1881. The stanza reads: “They fly from the land…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“Rice became a national sensation impersonating a crippled black man, but died penniless in 1860 of a paralytic condition that limited his…

— Isabel Wilkerson

America is made up of people who came from someplace else. Even the Native Americans came over the Bering strait... America is…

— Isabel Wilkerson

People leave when life becomes untenable where they are.

— Isabel Wilkerson

“That's why I preach today. Do not do spite," he said. "Spite does not pay. It goes around and misses the object…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“The Great Migration would not end until the 1970s, when the South began finally to change—the whites-only signs came down, the all-white…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“But black students were left on their own.”

— Isabel Wilkerson

“They traveled deep into far-flung regions of their own country and in some cases clear across the continent. Thus the Great Migration…

— Isabel Wilkerson

“for far longer: Blacks were enslaved in this country for 244 years, from 1619 to 1863. As of 2010, they have been free for 147 years.”

— Isabel Wilkerson