Jim crow Quote by Mike Espy

As a teenager growing up during Jim Crow, all I wanted to do was leave Mississippi. But I came back and raised my own…

— Mike Espy

When I was in college, I lived in a mostly black, poor neighborhood. That's where I grew up, but I attended a mostly white…

— Angie Thomas

My father is from Mississippi, and I heard stories of racial injustice my whole life.

— Omar Benson Miller

The Mississippi of 1920 was an exceptionally dangerous place for Black people. But my grandfather deeply believed in helping create opportunities to African-Americans to…

— Mike Espy

I did not believe what I was told about being poor and black and female in Mississippi in 1954.

— Oprah Winfrey

Like the Negro League players, I traveled through the segregated south as a young man. Because I was black, I was denied service at…

— Walter Dean Myers

The separate water foundations, park benches, bathrooms and restaurants of the Jim Crow South startled me. These experiences motivated my lifelong study of the…

— James Heckman

I didn't come east of the Mississippi for the first time in my life until I was 26 years of age, but I knew.…

— Sam Donaldson

“In the 1920s, Jim Crow Mississippi was, in all facets of society, a kleptocracy.”

— Ta-Nehisi Coates

I went to a historically Black college in Mississippi, Jackson State University. I also grew up in a small town that had one stoplight.

— Laphonza Butler

I was raised in Mississippi, in a family and a community that identified as black, and I have the stories and the experiences to…

— Jesmyn Ward

Growing up in Mississippi, I realized that it was separate and unequal and all that, but it was still a safe place.

— Morgan Freeman