Creativity Quote by Nat King Cole

Cole’s line lands with the calm force of someone who’s toured the country, smiled for the cameras, and still gotten threatened for daring to be visible. By shifting blame from “the people in the South” to “the people who are governing,” he’s doing two things at once: refusing the easy, comforting story that racism is just personal prejudice, and calling out how power manufactures “racial problems” as a policy choice.

The phrasing is strategic. Cole doesn’t absolve ordinary Southerners so much as he denies segregationists their favorite alibi: that discrimination is merely “how folks feel.” He points to governors, legislators, police chiefs, school boards - the machinery that turns bias into law, and law into everyday humiliation. In a mid-century America eager to frame civil rights as a clash of hotheads, Cole insists the real heat source is the state.

There’s also an artist’s pragmatism in it. As a mainstream Black pop star with a wide white audience, Cole speaks in a register that invites listeners in rather than scorches them out. The subtext is sharper than the tone: if racism is being governed into existence, it can be governed out - and the moral burden shifts to institutions, not “bad apples.”

Context matters. Cole was attacked onstage in Birmingham in 1956; his home was targeted after he moved into a white neighborhood in Los Angeles. He’s not theorizing. He’s testifying that the violence follows the cues of leadership, and that “order” in the Jim Crow South was never neutral - it was enforced.