A lot of African American women wanted to emulate white women. But I said in my mind, rationally thinking, there is no way you are going to get your hair that straight, especially in the summer.
CLAUDETTE COLVINI became aware of how the world is and how the white establishment plays black people against each other.
More Claudette Colvin Quotes
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I never swore when I was young.
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I always tell young people to hold on to their dreams. And sometimes you have to stand up for what you think is right even if you have to stand alone.
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I was about four years old the first time I ever saw what happened when you acted up to whites.
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A lot has changed since I grew up, but there’s still a long way to go. I don’t think we can move forward with Donald Trump as the president. There’s a disconnect there. We don’t want to regress, we want progress.
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I lost most of my friends. Their parents had told them to stay away from me, because they said I was crazy, I was an extremist.
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I’d like my grandchildren to be able to see that their grandmother stood up for something, a long time ago.
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I left the South in 1963 and was living in Morristown, New Jersey, when the March on Washington took place, so I watched it on television instead.
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I sleep when the sleep comes down on me.
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When I told my mother I was pregnant, I thought she was going to have a heart attack.
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When our founding fathers drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, black people weren’t even considered human.
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What do we have to do to make God love us?’ I always grew up with that. I always used to go around thinking that. ‘God loved the white people better. He must’ve. That’s why he made them white.’
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When you’ve been abused daily and you see people humiliated and harassed, you just get tired of it.
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I was ostracized by my community.
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Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn’t the case at all.
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I wanted the young African-American girls also on the bus to know that they had a right to be there, because they had paid their fare just like the white passengers.
CLAUDETTE COLVIN