Ed Smith Quotations

One of the prices that we pay for integration was the disintegration of the black community.

There's a way in which you can look at clothing as your outer skin. And because you were discriminated against because of your complexion, the way in which you could overcome that was through the way in which you presented yourself with your clothing.

I can think of no one that my grandparents knew, that told me stories and that I experienced myself, had any sense of social inferiority growing up in segregated Washington. None whatsoever.

Before Booker T. Washington, we have small business owners but we do not have a philosopher of black entrepreneurship, and that's what Washington was.

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.

Segregation was a burden for many blacks, because the end of the civil war and the amendments added to the constitution elevated expectations beyond reality in some respects.

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.

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.

The Washington black community was able to succeed beyond his wildest dreams. I mean, we had our own newspapers, our own restaurants, our own theaters, our own small shops, our own clubs, our own Masonic lodges.

What is wrong with George Bush? What is his problem?

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.

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.

We felt it was important to maintain consistency across this district.

We know everything gets started with that press. If we can't make shots and get into the press, we struggle.

We were anything but nervous. They are a loose group. Maybe they're too loose. And we were healthy. No excuses for our play tonight.

This radioactive material was packaged the way it should have been, in the proper equipment, to withstand a whole lot more than what it took last night.

She was a fellow officer; part of our departmental family, ... We have cars here from all over the state.

She took it right at those big girls and wasn't scared of them. She gave us the intensity that we needed at that time. She is too young to even think about doing it. She just did it.

She made some great shots out there. That was the reason they started to play better. She's a good player.

One of the aspects of the Post-Civil War period is that it unleashed in the black community this latent talent that had always been there but had not been manifested in so many different areas of activity.

If all the ruminations and ponderances were laid end to end along the equator, they would most likely go around in a really big circle

Give Tattnall some credit. They played great in the first half. When we hit some shots early in the third quarter, it helped us get into our pressure defense.

I think in terms of the specific aspects making Washington different than, say, Atlanta, or even Richmond or many other southern cities is the immediate post-civil war period. The fact that you create Howard University in 1867 just two years after the war ends. No other city that has a black community can claim a Howard.

It gives them (amateurs) a chance to get acquainted with tournaments.

It doesn't mean they will take it up then, but they could.

I was really happy our effort after a tough game yesterday against LaGrange. We came out with good energy and good intensity.

We received applications from 29 nonprofit groups, all of whom do great work to serve the needs of New Mexicans. Our five-member selection panel focused on organizations that provide critical human services, which are being stretched thin, due to the rapid growth of Rio Rancho and Sandoval County.

We've done a much better job this year with our shooting. I felt like that was the biggest area of improvement we needed.

We just didn't come out and played focused tonight. We won't win a state title if we play like this. But I'm confident that we will play better.

We played a pretty perfect game that night. I don't think it will be easy by any means. But the girls will be excited and ready to go on Saturday.

We played about 10 minutes of real good basketball. I don't know if it was our best stretch this season, but we played strong.

We still have a charge to determine whether it's homicide or suicide.

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.

We were visited by whites, who always found coming into the black community to be interesting. Some even found it exotic. They knew that some of our restaurants were superior to their own. One of the interesting things is that whites discriminated against blacks. Blacks never discriminated against whites, and so they were always welcome.

To the best of my knowledge, there will be changes in every single store. There will have to be to make this transition.

Vince Young is a hometown hero. He's an icon.

We did a good job of executing on defense in the first half. But we missed scoring opportunities after turnovers.

Ellington never graduated from high school, so when you speak about his success as a musician, his success as a businessman, his success as an organizer, the city was his tutor.

Duke Ellington doesn't name himself. He's nicknamed by his friends because of the manner in which he dresses, the manner in which he presents himself. He embodies all of that aristocratic tradition that made Duke Ellington noticed as a member of some kind of aristocratic class.

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.

The most impressive (thing) is they kept getting fan support. Even when they hit those big losing streaks, the fans stayed loyal.

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

They've been applying for these all across the country.

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.

They are serious farmers. This is a serious farming operation.

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 try to tell them before every game that somebody will have to come in and play well. Those girls really played well tonight.

It's real special when two teams bring everything they have to a championship basketball game. Both teams played exceptional defense, and this one feels good.

I'm glad the mayor has given a timetable. I know it's up to him to bring the names, but we don't want to wait more than a year.

I mean, you're talking about shutting an interstate down for four or five hours... it could have been several days had it gotten to that point.

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.

Howard is still a great school. But many of the great faculty members that would be at Howard today are now at Harvard and Yale and Princeton. All this comes as a consequence of affirmative action and the admissions policies that encouraged blacks to enroll in the Ivy League schools.

The community put such a premium on success. And you had no excuse to blame racism or discrimination as a reason why you couldn't succeed.