“I don't know why black skin may not cover a true heart as well as a white one.”
To a neighbor (1856), as quoted in A Personal History of Ulysses S. Grant https://books.google.com/books?id=0G1LAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA155&dq=%22may+not+cover+a+true+heart+as+well+as+a%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uZngVIKtGsicNqz1gYgB&ved=0CB0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false (1868), by Albert Deane Richardson, Hartford, Connecticut: American Publishing Company, p. 155. According to some other sources, he had also used this phrase in a letter to Robert E. Lee (General of the Confederacy).
1850s
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Ulysses S. Grant 177
18th President of the United States 1822–1885Related quotes

As quoted in El Punt (28 January 2012). "La teva cara em sona" http://www.elpuntavui.cat/noticia/article/5-cultura/19-cultura/500466-la-teva-cara-em-sona.html

Source: The Negro's Complaint (1788), Lines 13-16
“God does not know whether a skin is black or white, He sees only souls.”
Source: The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter

“I do not know why we equate—and with such examples before us—a white skin with civilisation.”
As quoted in "The Hon. Member For Houghton" https://web.archive.org/web/19960913173321/https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1987/04/20/the-hon-member-for-houghton (20 April 1987), by E. J. Kahn, The New Yorker

“Nearly all black and brown skins are beautiful, but a beautiful white skin is rare.”
Source: Following the Equator (1897), Ch. XLI

“white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President”
About Bill Clinton. Comment, The New Yorker, 5 October 1998.
Source: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1998/10/05/comment-6543

“Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.”
Vol. I, Ch. 10, Section 7, pg. 329.
Das Kapital (Buch I) (1867)
Source: Das Kapital/Das kommunistische Manifest
Context: In the United States of North America, every independent movement of the workers was paralysed so long as slavery disfigured a part of the Republic. Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.

Quote in his letter to brother Theo, from Nuenen, The Netherlands, Autumn 1885; as quoted in Vincent van Gogh, edited by Alfred H. Barr; Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1935 https://www.moma.org/documents/moma_catalogue_1996_300061887.pdf, (letter 428) p. 31
1880s, 1885