I became aware of how the world is and how the white establishment plays black people against each other.
CLAUDETTE COLVINThat was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person.
More Claudette Colvin Quotes
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New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama.
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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 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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For African-Americans, it’s still going to be – some people say double hard – I’d say four times as hard. Be an opportunist. Take advantage of your resources, because the only way to win is with education, self-esteem, having value in yourself.
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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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We were churchgoing people.
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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.
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Being dragged off that bus was worth it just to see Barack Obama become president, because so many others gave their lives and didn’t get to see it, and I thank God for letting me see it.
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That was worse than stealing, you know, talking back to a white person.
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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 never swore when I was young.
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I wanted to be an attorney. My mother would say I never stopped talking. I always had a lot of questions to ask, and I was never satisfied with the answer. A lot of things I wasn’t satisfied by.
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As long as white people put people of color, African Americans and Latinos, in the same dispensable bag, and look at our children of color as insignificant and treat women of color as not as deserving of protection as white women, we will never achieve true equality.
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There were many African Americans – many, many stories similar to my story.
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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.
CLAUDETTE COLVIN