James Meredith
James Meredith

If black people use their resources properly, they can become as competitive as any group in society - take control of our neighborhoods, our businesses, our schools, including our teachers. The only thing keeping black people from doing it is this idiotic idea about integration, about being racially balanced.

James Meredith
James Meredith

Liberal whites are the greatest enemy of African Americans.

James Meredith
James Meredith

Nothing is a bigger waste of time than regretting the past and worrying about the future.

James Meredith
James Meredith

Integration is the biggest con job ever pulled on any group of people, any nationality in the world. It was a plot by white liberals to gain black political power for themselves and their wild ideas, and for a few black bourgeoisie who were paid to exercise leverage as black spokesmen.

James Meredith
James Meredith

My answer to the racial problem in America is to not deal with it at all. The founding fathers dealt with it when they made the Constitution.

James Meredith
James Meredith

Nothing could be more insulting to me than the concept of civil rights. It means perpetual second-class citizenship for me and my kind.

James Meredith
James Meredith

Only the family of God can solve the problems of our time.

James Meredith
James Meredith

Do you know who the real hypocrite is? It's the federal government and the Justice Department. It's a fraud; it's a lie. They have no interest in the education of black children. They are only interested in the politics of it.

James Meredith
James Meredith

Only whites were allowed by law and practice to attend the University of Mississippi - a public institution supported by public dollars. Anything public and supported by public dollars is for me.

James Meredith
James Meredith

The real problem in Mississippi is almost a complete moral breakdown. In order to move Mississippi from the bottom to the top, all we have to do is just get people to do a little more what they know, to practice a little more of what they preach.

James Meredith
James Meredith

Have you ever heard of Irish, Poles, Germans, Italians and Jews being integrated? They go anywhere and just enjoy their rights. Why call it integration when black folks do the same thing? It's a con job.

James Meredith
James Meredith

My statue at Ole Miss is a false idol. And it wasn't put there for my benefit. It was put there for Ole Miss and Mississippi.

James Meredith
James Meredith

I've always found the rhetoric of mainstream civil rights leaders and organizations to be far too timid, accommodationist, and gradualist. It always seemed to me that they behaved like meek and gentle supplicants begging the oppressor for a few crumbs of justice, for a few molecules of citizenship rights.

James Meredith
James Meredith

I considered myself engaged in a war from Day One. And my objective was to force the federal government - the Kennedy administration at that time - into a position where they would have to use the United States military force to enforce my rights as a citizen.

James Meredith
James Meredith

I was taught to believe that the most dishonorable thing a Meredith could do was work in a white woman's kitchen and take care of a white man's child. I knew I would starve to death rather than do either.

James Meredith
James Meredith

Do you know how big of an insult that is to me - to say that I had to be brave to confront some ignorant white folks?

James Meredith
James Meredith

You gotta understand - the state of Mississippi was in rebellion. It had rebelled against the United States. Now that has been a very difficult story for America to tell, but that's what actually happened.

James Meredith
James Meredith

My great-grandfather was the last ruler of the Choctaw Nation, and from birth, I was taught that my role was to restore the power and the glory to my bloodline.

James Meredith
James Meredith

What I did at Ole Miss had nothing to do with going to classes. My objective was to destroy the system of white supremacy.

James Meredith
James Meredith

My momma was slick as greased lightning. She knew how to get anybody and everybody to do whatever she wanted 'em to do.