Daily Inspiration Quote by Sammy Davis, Jr.

Bogart could have been color blind: a deliberately blunt exaggeration that works because it’s less about ophthalmology than about a moral baseline so rare it has to be framed as almost biologically anomalous. Sammy Davis Jr. isn’t polishing a saint; he’s sketching a kind of everyday decency that, in mid-century America, read like a superpower. Coming from an entertainer who lived the contradictions of showbiz integration, the line lands with both gratitude and indictment.

The subtext is twofold. First, it’s a quiet rebuke of an industry that marketed “cool” while enforcing segregation behind the velvet rope. Davis doesn’t need to name the rules; the compliment does it for him. If Bogart “got to know a man” before judging him, that implies most people did the opposite, sorting first by race and only later (if ever) by character. Second, it’s a portrait of power: Bogart’s stature let him treat racism as optional, a social custom he could ignore. Davis recognizes that choice as meaningful precisely because so many others, even well-intentioned liberals, treated prejudice as the default setting of their time.

The phrasing also hints at the weary calculus of being a Black star in white spaces. “He decided if he liked him or not” isn’t utopian brotherhood; it’s the modest, hard-won dignity of being evaluated as a person. Davis’s compliment, then, is less a Hallmark sentiment than a record of what counted as radical normalcy: the right to be disliked for the usual reasons.