Quote by Derrick Bell

One drop of black blood and you're black. That was the rule. That's what kept the wall between whites and blacks was this one…

— Shelby Steele

“Taft ended his opinion with an added clause, a statement so bold that it would rattle even his strongest supporters. The chief justice of…

— Adrienne Berard

“It is often forgotten today that Plessy v. Ferguson was not an isolated Supreme Court decision. In case after case, the Court reaffirmed and…

— Erwin Chemerinsky

“One law prohibited blacks from testifying against whites in court, and carefully defined “negro” as anyone who had one nonwhite grandparent.”

— Gail Collins

“Here is a foundation for understanding today what was clear to only a few fifty years earlier. Now we can see how the state-mandated…

— Derrick Bell

no case of libel by a negro against a white would even reach a southern court.

— Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings

That kind of thing happens to black people every day in this country, and they don't receive that kind of sentence he did, which…

— Ishmael Reed

“The story would be told many times in American history: Black property legally or illegally seized; the resulting Black destitution blamed on Black inferiority;”

— Ibram X. Kendi

“Yet the average white person also has a responsibility. He has to resist the impulse to seize upon the rioter as the exclusive villain.…

— Martin Luther King Jr

“Segregation laws were proposed as part of a deliberate effort to drive a wedge between poor whites and African Americans. These discriminatory barriers were…

— Michelle Alexander

“When now we turn and look five miles above, there on the edge of town are five houses of prostitutes,—two of blacks and three…

— W.E.B. Du Bois

“It was a grand opportunity for the low whites, who had no negroes of their own to scourge. They exulted in such a chance…

— Harriet Ann Jacobs