When you’ve been abused daily and you see people humiliated and harassed, you just get tired of it.
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 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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There were many African Americans – many, many stories similar to my story.
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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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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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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 ostracized by my community.
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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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New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama.
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Rosa Parks wasn’t the first one to rebel against the segregated seats. I was the first one.
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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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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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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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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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There was segregation everywhere. The churches, buses and schools were all segregated and you couldn’t even go into the same restaurants.
CLAUDETTE COLVIN