Birmingham Quote by Isabel Wilkerson

“It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.” quote by Isabel Wilkerson — Download Open image

“It was illegal for black people and white people to play checkers together in Birmingham. And there were even black and white Bibles to swear to tell the truth on in many parts of the South.”

Isabel Wilkerson

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Birmingham Black Black and white Black people Checkers Illegal People Play South Swear Telling the truth Together White White people

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“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…

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

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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…

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“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,…

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“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…

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

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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…

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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…

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“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…

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

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“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

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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

Explore all 63 Isabel Wilkerson quotes

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