Why We Must Protest...Mary McLeod Bethune

"If we accept and acquiesce in the face of discrimination, we accept the responsibility ourselves and allow those responsible to salve their conscience by believing that they have our acceptance and concurrence. We should, therefore, protest openly everything... that smacks of discrimination or slander."

--Mary McLeod Bethune (1875-1955)
"Certain Unalienable Rights," What the Negro Wants, edited by Rayford W. Logan (1944)

The Statue of Dr. Mary McLeod Bethune
stands on the campus of
Bethune-Cookman University
in Daytona Beach, Florida.

Us vs. Them

If you do the same things that they do, you are just like them. The end does not justify the means. You are just like them.

On Race Relations...Jimmy Carter

"Well, I think we kind of breathed a sigh of relief back in the ’60s, after we had 100 years of racial discrimination with separate but equal, and the Supreme Court and the Congress and everybody else agreed to that, all the churches.

And after the Johnson years of Voting Rights Act and Martin Luther King Jr., Andy Young and others being successful, I think the United States kind of breathed a sigh of relief and said, well, we have resolved the race issue now, and there won’t be anymore, detectable, at least, elements of an American society where whites are in the supreme position, to the detriment of blacks.

...the recent high publicity about the police and black confrontations and the tragedy in Charleston (Shooting death of Walter Scott, 4/4/15) have reminded us that we still have a long way to go. There’s still an innate racism in our country that needs to be addressed accurately."

--Jimmy Carter, 39th President of the United States

The Dichotomy Between Polite Bigotry and Overt Racism...Michelle Alexander

“When we think of racism we think of Governor Wallace of Alabama blocking the schoolhouse door; we think of water hoses, lynchings, racial epithets, and "whites only" signs. These images make it easy to forget that many wonderful, goodhearted white people who were generous to others, respectful of their neighbors, and even kind to their black maids, gardeners, or shoe shiners--and wished them well--nevertheless went to the polls and voted for racial segregation... Our understanding of racism is therefore shaped by the most extreme expressions of individual bigotry, not by the way in which it functions naturally, almost invisibly (and sometimes with genuinely benign intent), when it is embedded in the structure of a social system.” 

--Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness