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"I think a lot of people don't have any idea of how deeply segregated our schools have become all over again. Most textbooks are not honest in what they teach our high school students."
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"The Edge... there is no honest way to explain it because the only people who really know where it is are the ones who have gone over."

"People who have given us their complete confidence believe that they have a right to ours. The inference is false, a gift confers no rights."

"When you use the term minority or minorities in reference to people, you're telling them that they're less than somebody else."

"What had begun as a movement to free all black people from racist oppression became a movement with its primary goal the establishment of black male patriarchy."
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"The ones I pity are the ones who never stick out their neck for something they believe, never know the taste of moral struggle, and never have the thrill of victory."

"When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement."

"Instead of seeing these children for the blessings that they are, we are measuring them only by the standard of whether they will be future deficits or assets for our nation's competitive needs."

"What I tell these young people is, the world is not as dangerous as the older generation would like you to believe. Anyone I know who has ever taken a risk and lost a job has ended up getting a better one two years later."

"An awful lot of people come to college with this strange idea that there's no longer segregation in America's schools, that our schools are basically equal; neither of these things is true."

"Nationally, overwhelmingly non-white schools receive $1,000 less per pupil than overwhelmingly white schools."

"But for the children of the poorest people we're stripping the curriculum, removing the arts and music, and drilling the children into useful labor. We're not valuing a child for the time in which she actually is a child."

"During the decades after Brown v. Board of Education there was terrific progress. Tens of thousands of public schools were integrated racially. During that time the gap between black and white achievement narrowed."

"Children are not simply commodities to be herded into line and trained for the jobs that white people who live in segregated neighborhoods have available."
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