You cannot naturalise an unnatural beast. A human abortion. A hellish freak. But you can exterminate it. Horatio Bottomley, right-wing journalist, calling for persecution of naturalised Germans, following sinking of Lusitania
Fear of something is at the root of hate for others, and hate within will eventually destroy the hater. George Washington Carver
The only thing that white people have that black people need or should want is power – and no-one holds power for ever. James Arthur Baldwin
For young black men, in the late teens or early twenties growing up in the early 1960s, you were a citizen of the country and yet everywhere you went there were signs reading White and Coloured ... Constant daily reminders you were a second-class citizen. Manning Marable, Columbia University
In April and May of 1963 you have the single most important urban mobilisation in the desegregation struggle of the South – and that’s in Birmingham. King is jailed. Thousands are jailed. In September 1963 you have the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing ... The month before you have the March on Washington DC. Two hundred and fifty thousand Americans black and white demonstrating – pressing the Kennedy administration to push Congress to adopt national Civil Rights legislation. In November 1963 you have the assassination of President Kennedy ... That was the context in which the Cassius Clay-Sonny Liston fight occurred. Manning Marable
White people love playing divide and rule. Diane Abbott MP, January 2012
The white race is the cancer of human history, it is the white race, and it alone – its ideologies and intentions – which eradicates autonomous civilisations wherever it spreads, which has upset the ecological balance of the planet, which now threatens the very existence of life itself. Susan Sontag, cited Partisan Review 1967
This president [Obama] I think has exposed himself over and over again as a guy who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture ... I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people, I’m saying he has a problem. This guy is, I believe, a racist. Glenn Beck
For those who have made our own lives possible, those who have given us our traditions, they didn’t look back to find out what our color was or what our religion was or what our race was, they didn’t look that way to us. Robert Kennedy, June 1966 South Africa
When you teach a man to hate and fear his brother, when you teach that he is a lesser man because of his color or his beliefs or the policies he pursues, when you teach that those who differ from you threaten your freedom or your job or your family, then you also learn to confront others not as fellow citizens but as enemies, to be met not with cooperation but with conquest; to be subjugated and mastered. We learn, at the last, to look at our brothers as aliens, men with whom we share a city, but not a community; men bound to us in common dwelling, but not in common effort. We learn to share only a common fear, only a common desire to retreat from each other, only a common impulse to meet disagreement with force. Robert Kennedy, April 1968
When I look out upon this audience I see both black and white faces. The basic question of whether we as black and white citizens in the United States are going to be able to live together, or whether we are going to divide ourselves into two armed camps. Robert Kennedy
How can we say to a Negro in Jackson when war comes you will be an American citizen but in the meantime you’re a citizen of Mississippi, and we cannot help you? How by any moral standards can we tell our Negro citizens our forefathers brought your forefathers over here against their will and we are going to make you pay for it? Yet isn’t that what this argument boils down to? The United States is dominated by white people politically and economically. The question is whether we in this position of dominance are going to have not the charity but the wisdom to stop penalising our fellow citizens whose only former sin is that they were born. Robert Kennedy
I think the great divisions in the country at the present moment are between those who are less affluent – our black citizens, Mexican-Americans and those who are poor whites – and the rest of the United States. They feel that they have been disenfranchised. Or that they have no association or identification with the United States government or with our society. That is the division. Robert Kennedy
The black race is the people through which the devil has always been able to bring evil unto the earth. Warren Jeffs, FDLS
No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes naturally to the human heart than its opposite. Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom 1994
For years inter-racial sex was one of the great taboos. A world divided by the idea of race. Mixed Race Britain: How the World Got Mixed Up, BBC 2011
Mixing changed the lives of individuals, the outcomes of wars, and the destinies of empires. Inter-racial sex shaped our modern world. ibid.
1967 ... In 16 American states inter-racial sex is still illegal. ibid.
The Lovings left Virginia. But they decided to challenge the judge’s verdict. And the case ended up at the US Supreme Court ... 1967 had become the summer of Loving in more than ways than one. ibid.
People have never remained on the continents of their origin. ibid.
In such a climate sexual hypocrisy flourished. ibid.
Thomas Jefferson fathered six children by his slave Sally Hemings. Yet in 1786 he drafted a bill to make inter-racial marriage illegal. ibid.
One in three white Americans have African or Native American ancestry dating from the colonial period. ibid.
In Jamaica, British masters and overseers became notorious for exploiting the women they ruled. ibid.
Thistlewood’s diaries demonstrate that the concept of fidelity was alien to him. ibid.
In the context of the other European empires they were not exceptional. In the early sixteenth century Spain’s Conquistadors took over the Aztec empire in central America. ibid.
As the East India Company’s operations expanded, unions between British men and Indian women became excepted, even commonplace. ibid.
The verdict in the Plessy v Ferguson case had far-reaching implications. For three generations legally sanctioned segregation put immense strain on relations between black and white Americans. ibid.
The Klu Klux Klan lynched, killed and maimed those who dared to pollute the purity of their race. ibid.
Birth of a Nation ... Hugely controversial at the time of its release the film was a massive box-office success and was hailed by President Woodrow Wilson who described it as history written with lightning. ibid.
In the late nineteenth century British anthropologist Francis Galton developed the theory of Eugenics. ibid.
The Gestapo rounded up hundreds of these mixed-race children whom the Nazis called the Rhineland Bastards. They were ordered to attend clinics, and without warning were sterilised. ibid.
In South Africa opposition to race-mixing grew in intensity throughout the twentieth century. ibid.
The Black Peril – a paranoid fantasy based on long-standing myths regarding black male sexuality. ibid.
Of all the laws introduced in the Apartheid era it was the Group Areas Act that had the deepest impact on the day to day lives of South Africans. ibid.
Decades after the bulldozers left, District 6 remains a wasteland. The apartheid regime’s attempt to segregate the country was just one of the persecutions faced by millions of South Africans. ibid.
Imperial history has created a world far more mixed than we ever suspected. ibid.
Ghana ... In 1961 Joe Appiah [married British white woman] was detained for political reasons. ibid.
Mixed ancestry might bestow natural advantages in human cultures. ibid.
Racism remains a persistent problem across the world. ibid.
Black Power: Statement By National Committee of Negro Churches ... When American leaders decide to serve the real welfare of people instead of war and destruction; when American leaders are forced to make the rebuilding of our cities first priority on the nation’s agenda; when American leaders are forced by American people to quit misusing and abusing American power then will the cry for black power become inaudible ... We deplore the overt violence of riots, but we believe it is more important to focus on the real sources of these eruptions. The New York Times Sunday full-page statement placed by 51 pastors 31st July 1966
Some of the Turks ... and the Blacks ... their nature is like the nature of mute animals ... they are not on the level of human beings, and their level among existing things is below that of a man and above that of a monkey, because they have the image and the resemblance of a man more than a monkey does. Rabbi Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed, Book III Chapter 51
I believe that there is a racist component to the death penalty. Ronald Hampton, executive director US National Black Police Association