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.
CLAUDETTE COLVINA 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.
More Claudette Colvin Quotes
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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.
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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 was about four years old the first time I ever saw what happened when you acted up to whites.
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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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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 I told my mother I was pregnant, I thought she was going to have a heart attack.
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New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama.
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I sleep when the sleep comes down on me.
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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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We were churchgoing people.
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I was ostracized by my community.
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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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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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I never swore when I was young.
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