Ed Smith White Quotations

The black community now in many ways divided itself the way the larger white community divides itself, over class issues. And that race is no longer the bond that it once was. That's one of the prices you pay for progress.

When you say that you are a race man, it means that you embrace the entire black community regardless of the hue, whether somebody is very light and could pass for possibly white or someone is very dark.

We didn't have any Ku Klux Klan in Washington, D.C. There was no White Citizens Council. I mean, there was just this vast separation that you didn't have any kind of contact with until you went beyond the boundaries of your community.

There were some kind white people out there who provided a loan here or there, or a little bit of land. But Booker T. Washington and his followers knew that they were going to have to draw from their own resources and they knew that the larger white world was looking at them, every day, closely monitoring them.

I never heard people speak about segregation as some great cross that they were bearing. They just went on about their lives. Some of them had good contacts with white people that they were serving in someone's home. Sometimes those white families almost effectively adopted you.