"Segregation never brought anyone anything except trouble"
About this Quote
A lawyer’s sentence that reads like a closing argument, stripped to its most prosecutable claim: segregation is not merely immoral, it is operationally disastrous. Paul Harris doesn’t sermonize. He delivers a verdict. “Never” is the tell - an absolute meant to foreclose the usual evasions (“some people benefited,” “it kept order,” “it was just the times”). The line refuses nostalgia and treats segregation as a policy with an evidentiary record: exhibit after exhibit of conflict, waste, backlash, and institutional rot.
The craft is in the understatement. Harris doesn’t name the violence, the humiliation, the theft of opportunity. He collapses the whole system into one word: “trouble.” That sounds almost mild, but it’s strategically mild, the kind of plain language designed to travel. “Trouble” covers riots and lawsuits, bitterness and economic drag, family trauma and civic corrosion. It also sidesteps the defenses that often meet moral language; it’s harder to argue with consequences than with conscience.
Context matters: Harris lived through the entrenchment of Jim Crow and the era when “separate but equal” posed as legal common sense. As a lawyer, he would have understood segregation as a generator of disputes the law cannot cleanly contain - a machine that produces grievances, enforcement costs, and legitimacy crises. The subtext is pragmatic but not neutral: if a society has to constantly police distance between human beings, it’s already admitting it can’t justify itself. Segregation, Harris implies, is a self-sustaining emergency.
The craft is in the understatement. Harris doesn’t name the violence, the humiliation, the theft of opportunity. He collapses the whole system into one word: “trouble.” That sounds almost mild, but it’s strategically mild, the kind of plain language designed to travel. “Trouble” covers riots and lawsuits, bitterness and economic drag, family trauma and civic corrosion. It also sidesteps the defenses that often meet moral language; it’s harder to argue with consequences than with conscience.
Context matters: Harris lived through the entrenchment of Jim Crow and the era when “separate but equal” posed as legal common sense. As a lawyer, he would have understood segregation as a generator of disputes the law cannot cleanly contain - a machine that produces grievances, enforcement costs, and legitimacy crises. The subtext is pragmatic but not neutral: if a society has to constantly police distance between human beings, it’s already admitting it can’t justify itself. Segregation, Harris implies, is a self-sustaining emergency.
Quote Details
| Topic | Equality |
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