Ed Smith People Quotations

People should have the choice to be able to live where they want to live, go to school where they want to go to school, marry whoever they want to marry regardless of what their complexion is and so forth.

So I'm a young boy in the 1940s growing up, seeing Ralph Bunche on a regular basis, seeing Duke Ellington on a regular basis. We know that these people are famous. They're living in the same community as we live in. They go to the same stores and shops.

It seems every year, people make the resolution to exercise and lose weight and get in shape.

Even during my youth, I can recall very few black people living on any kind of public assistance. People were working, doing some kind of job that was useful to the community.

Many of the master chefs in the South, both the upper South as well as the deep South, were blacks and many of those people came here to Washington, D.C., and opened up establishments. Very, very few of them have survived. But they certainly were very prominent.

When you were growing up in the 30s, 20s, of course the 40s, all black people at least in the Washington, D.C., area were required to live among themselves.

People reacted badly, largely because it didn't reflect where they are today. Maybe Mary was taking a concept that was lying around a while, or making a return to the roots of where she started out. Or maybe the market for the show isn't actually here, but on the mainland. So if you want to talk to a mainland audience, you give them a caricature they know.

Some people just won't come gambling because gambling and smoking go hand in hand.

A lot of people today look at Booker T. Washington as a Uncle Tom as a sell out to his community. That business tradition that you see celebrated today and BET and any number of successful black enterprises, it starts off with Booker T. Washington.

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.

It's so much less pressure here. No one cares if you make a mistake. You can play a song to try it out. People are very respectful.

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.