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.
CLAUDETTE COLVINI 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.
More Claudette Colvin Quotes
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I was ostracized by my community.
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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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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 our founding fathers drafted the Constitution and Bill of Rights, black people weren’t even considered human.
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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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The light-skinned girls always thought they were better looking. So did the teachers, too. That meant most of the dark complexion ones didn’t like themselves.
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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.
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I never swore when I was young.
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New York is a completely different culture to Montgomery, Alabama.
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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 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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I’ve always told my children that once they go out into the world, they must have two heads and two minds: one to keep grounded, the other to deal with corporate America.
CLAUDETTE COLVIN







