... When we let freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, ‘Free at last! Free at last! Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!’ Martin Luther King
Racial segregation must be seen for what it is – and that is an evil system, a new form of slavery covered up with certain niceties of complexity ... Segregation is evil because it relegates persons to the status of things ... And segregation is evil because it stigmatizes the segregated as an untouchable in a caste system. We’ve been in the mountain of segregation long enough and it is time for all men of goodwill to say now, We are through with segregation now, henceforth, and forever more. Martin Luther King
I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality ... I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word. Martin Luther King
I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream – a dream yet unfulfilled. A dream of equality of opportunity, of privilege and property widely distributed; a dream of a land where men will not take necessities from the many to give luxuries to the few; a dream of a land where men will not argue that the color of a man’s skin determines the content of his character; a dream of a nation where all our gifts and resources are held not for ourselves alone, but as instruments of service for the rest of humanity; the dream of a country where every man will respect the dignity and worth of the human personality. Martin Luther King
Had I anything to do with the Negro, I would confine them by strict law to their own species. Joseph Smith founder Mormon church, cited History of the Church V:21-218
For it is my will, that in time, ye should take unto you wives of the Lamanites and Nephites, that their posterity may become white, delightsome and just, for even now their females are more virtuous than the gentiles. Joseph Smith, revelation Missouri 1831
Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man mixes who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so. Brigham Young, second Mormon prophet, Journal of Discourses X:110
You must not think, from what I say, that I am opposed to slavery. No! The Negro is damned, and is to serve his master till God chooses to remove the curse of Ham. Brigham Young, cited New York Herald 4th May 1855 & A Journal of Mormon Thought Spring 1973
Although, I do not care much for a Negro, still I have a warm spot in my heart for those beautiful singers. David O McKay, ninth Mormon prophet
I saw a striking contrast in the progress of the Indian people today ... The day of the Lamanites is nigh. For years they have been growing delightsome, and they are now becoming white and delightsome, as they were promised. In this picture of the twenty Lamanite missionaries, fifteen of the twenty were as light as Anglos, five were darker but equally delightsome. The children in the home placement program in Utah are often lighter than their brothers and sisters in the hogans on the reservation. At one meeting a father and mother and their sixteen-year-old daughter were present, the little member girl – sixteen – sitting between the dark father and mother, and it was evident she was several shades lighter than her parents – on the same reservation, in the same hogan, subject to the same sun and wind and weather ... These young members of the Church are changing to whiteness and to delightsomeness. Spencer W Kimball, General Conference address 1960
The writer has been privileged to sit at table with several members of the Catawba tribe of Indians, whose reservation is near the north border of South Carolina. That tribe, or most of its people, are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Those Indians, at least as many as I have observed, were white and delightsome, as white and fair as any group of citizens of our country. I know of no prophecy, ancient or modern, that has had a more literal fulfilment. George Edward Clark, Why I Believe p129
Reasons for Repatriation ... Intimate association between black or coloured men and white women is a thing of horror. Administrator of Bechuanaland retired, letter to Times 14th June 1919
It’s such a pity that a Chinaman is fastidious. He will not take a battered old prostitute of the seaport but wants something young, attractive, above all clean and free from venereal disease. UK Home Office guidance
The Negro is said to be more largely developed than the white man, and a woman who has once been with a Negro is said to find no satisfaction with anything else. UK Home Office memo to Foreign Office 1925
No first class nation can afford to produce a race of mongrels. James Wentworth Day, post-war Conservative candidate
The black man ... has a different set of standards, values, morals and principles. In many cases their grandfathers were eating each other. James Wentworth Day
If the colour bar is not broken down now it will break down the Empire. We’re proud of our heritage and do not want to be subjected to any experience which will rob us of that pride or which will cast a slur there on. Dr Harold Moody, League of Coloured Peoples
Segregation now. Segregation tomorrow. And segregation for ever. George Wallace, Alabama governor
Enoch Powell died and knocked on the gates of Heaven. A voice says, ‘Who’s dat?’ He says, ‘Ooh forget it.’ Bernard Manning
It is like writing history with lightning. And my only regret is that it is all so terribly true. Woodrow Wilson, re D W Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation
Ever since the start of industrial history the ruling classes have sought propaganda methods to divert the attention of the workers from the ineptitude and savagery of capitalism. Imperialism and Race have been used with recurrent fervour for this purpose – and with great success. Both issues are closely interlocked. Hand in hand with propaganda about the glories of empire – so assiduously used to drug the militancy of the worker in the last century – went the notion that those conquered by British marauders were in some way intrinsically inferior to them. For the British such notions were tinged with colour. For the colonised peoples were almost all black or brown, while the British colonists, including those in Australia and America, were white. Thus all white men were great men, and all black men were ignorant illiterate savages. This was no accidental conclusion. It was the deliberate propaganda of 19th century imperialists. Paul Foot, article 1965, ‘Imperialism and Race Ideologies’
It was the decline of the capitalist boom which sparked off Powell’s innate racialism. In 1968, spurred by the then Labour government’s capitulation to racialist pressure to introduce special and entirely unnecessary immigration controls on East African Asians, Powell went to Birmingham to deliver a speech which reeked of racialist hate against the black minority. He used the foulest racialist language, referring to black children as ‘grinning picaninnies’.
He gave full vent to all the crudest racialist stereotypes, linking people’s propensity to crime, fecklessness and disorder to the colour of their skins and their countries of origin. He predicted in the most colourful phrases a race war unless the numbers of blacks were cut down.
The response was devastating. Powell touched a deep racialist nerve, not just in his own class but in the working class as well. London dockers went on strike and marched to parliament calling for ‘Enoch for Prime Minister’. All over the country racialists, who until then had felt something shameful about abusing immigrants, shed their inhibitions ...
Since then, he has never objected to the word racialist. Indeed, he has seemed to revel in his racialist reputation. Again and again over the last 18 years, every time the relationship between the black and white communities was rocked by some crisis, Powell has intervened to stoke up the flames.
None of his monstrous predictions in 1968 have come true. Yet he has persisted with the same racist demagogy, hurling insult after insult at black people. Paul Foot, article 1986, ‘Powell’s Poison Platform’
Race had played a big part in the election in the Midlands especially at Smethwick where the Tory campaign was supported with the slogan, ‘If you want a nigger for a neighbour, vote Labour’. As a result, Labour trimmed its original opposition to Commonwealth immigration controls, and adopted a fudged compromise.
On that Clapham lorry Wilson could easily have retreated into this compromise and answered the racist taunts with the usual politician’s claptrap, ‘On the one hand, this, on the other, that’. But he didn’t. Every time the cry went up, ‘Send home the blacks,’ he rounded on the heckler, angry and sarcastic. ‘Whom should we send home? The nurses in our hospitals? The people who drive our buses? Where would our health service be without the black workers who keep it going?’ These questions were greeted with great roars of approval from the crowd, and the hecklers were silenced ...
As the months of Labour government went on, the joy subsided, but the hope persevered. My first really grim disillusionment came in July 1965, when the government ushered in immigration laws far more racist and ruthless than anything the Tories had contemplated ...
In 1967 he re-imposed the health prescription charges he’d abolished. In 1968 he sanctioned another, even more racist, immigration act to keep out persecuted Asians from East Africa. In 1969 he proposed to ban unofficial strikes, the first plan for anti-union laws since the war. Throughout all this he supported the barbaric US invasion of Vietnam with a passion which inspired the US president Johnson to describe him as ‘another Churchill’. Paul Foot, article June 1995, ‘Pipe Dreams’