American+Racial+Mores

“The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” --W.E.B Du Bois

"We conclude that in the field of public education, the doctrine of separate but equal has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal." --Brown v. Board of Education

"The picture of the girl screaming after Elizabeth Eckford as she walked through the mob on the day the National Guard turned back the black students haunted me. No one seemed to be able to identify the girl, and small wonder. We were not used to seeing our students look like that. But by noon on Friday, I discovered she was someone I knew, and I sent for her in the afternoon. When she readily admitted she was the screaming girl I told her how distressed I was to hear it since hatred destroys the people who hate. She shrugged. 'Well, that was the way she felt,' she said. Undeterred by her shrug, I said that I hoped I’d never see her pretty face so distorted again, that I never would have recognized that ugly face in the picture as hers. Wasted breath." --Elizabeth Huckaby, vice-president of Central High

--Elizabeth Eckford
 * "**Somewhere along the line, [staying at Central High] became an obligation. I realized that what we were doing was not for ourselves."

“The first who attracts the eye, the first in enlightenment, in power and in happiness, is the white man, the European, man par excellence; below him appear the Negro and the Indian. These two unfortunate races have neither birth, nor face, nor language, nor mores in common; only their misfortunes look alike. Both occupy an equally inferior position in the country that they inhabit; both experience the effects of tyranny; and if their miseries are different, they can accuse the same author for them." --Alexis de Tocqueville

"If what we call prejudice against color be natural i.e., a part of human nature itself, it follows that it must be co-extensive with human nature, and will and mist manifest itself whenever and wherever the two races are brought into contact” --Fredrick Douglass

“In the abstract, there is no prejudice against color. No man shrinks from another because he is clothed in a suit of black, nor offended with his boots because they are black” --Fredrick Douglass

"When it occurred to me that the man had not //seen me//, actually; that he, as far as he knew; was in the midst of a walking nightmare!”--Ralph Ellison“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by thecontent of their character.”--Martin Luther King, Jr.

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Reflections on Race