Quotes About Civil rights

The government has a history of not treating people fairly, from the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II to African-Americans in the Civil Rights era.

All the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, into our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.

I grew up in the 1970s, but I don't think a whole lot had changed from the '60s. Oh, it had changed in the law books - but not in the kitchens of white homes.

What you might not know is that shortly after she worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and others, Rosa Parks had to leave her home in Alabama to escape the constant threat of violence.

Well, when Christ comes back this time, I hope He comes back mad His own self. I hope He drives the Jim Crowers out of their high places, every living last one of them from Washington to Texas.

The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented precisely such a hope - that America had learned from its past and acted to secure a better tomorrow.

Our mistreatment was just not right, and I was tired of it.

For years now I have heard the word "wait." It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never."

Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the political leaders consistently refused to engage in good-faith negotiation.

Even if our motives are presently misunderstood. We will reach the goal of freedom in Birmingham and all over the nation, because the goal of America is freedom.

The Negro's problem will not be solved by running away.

The purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation.

A second way that oppressed people sometimes deal with oppression is to resort to physical violence and corroding hatred.

We had no alternative except that of preparing for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and national community.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.

If the Negro is to achieve the goal of integration, he must organize himself into a militant and nonviolent mass movement.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

If America don't come around, we're gonna burn it down.

When the Balfour Declaration was released to the public at the end of the year, Gertrude attacked it viciously. Sir Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, had written a letter to Lord Rothschild, leader of the Jewish community in England, promising "a national home for the Jewish people" in Palestine. The Balfour Declaration vowed not to prejudice "the civil and religious rights" of the Arabs already living in Palestine.

With heightened tensions at home and abroad, he had a weak track record on both fronts. Soaring rhetoric was one thing, but when it came to policy, he had floundered. From the Bay of Pigs fiasco to his window dressing on civil rights, his presidency lacked any significant accomplishment.

Across the political spectrum, Americans assert that any form of white racial consciousness or solidarity is despicable. Whites, therefore, have tried to keep their end of the civil rights bargain. They have dismantled and condemned their own racial identity in the expectation that others will do the same.

When blacks vote overwhelmingly for a black candidate, they are only exercising their civil rights. When whites vote for the white opponent, they are racist.

Another Harvard research project concluded bluntly that by 2004, American schools were just as segregated as they were in 1969, the year after Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated.

Roy Innis, chairman of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), denounces the many black leaders who still blame whites for all the woes that befall blacks: With few exceptions, these leaders have failed to recognize or do not accept that the major impediments to black progress have been removed…. The major remaining impediments to the progress of black people today are the evils indigenous to the black community. This is the new civil-rights battleground….1035