Quotes About Civil rights

In reality, civil rights are more important than national rights. They're the content, the day-to-day: work, life. But people are sensitive to national rights.

Equal rights should not be debatable and certainly should not be put to a vote of the people. Would we ask the electorate to vote on whether or not Catholics and Protestants should marry? Of course we would not.

The March on Washington was a defining moment in the history of this country and a great example of our nation truly living up to its creed.

My father wanted me to be a dentist like him, or any doctor, really. There was this attitude of, 'The civil rights movement was not about you being an artist.'

An abusive cop does not equal a bigoted police department.

It's ludicrous that my friends in California aren't able to legally get married. It's a civil rights issue. In 20 years we're going to look back at tapes of these antigay people saying ridiculous things on the news and it's going to sound as antiquated as the newsreels of horrible racists from the '50s.

I worry about civil-rights activists being targeted as black-identity extremists. I worry about the government saying, 'I don't like this progressive blogger' and subjecting them to scrutiny.

Water from the white fountain didn't taste any better than from the black fountain.

The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority.

I remember being taught my place.

I'm an American citizen. I pay my taxes. I want my equal rights. But this is my country, and consequently, I don't want to open up for ISIS or for anybody that will take away what we've already gained.

We do not show the Negro how to overcome segregation, but we teach him how to accept it as final and just.

You know you don't see hospital consultants going on strike, and I don't believe that teachers and head teachers should. It's within their rights, it's a civil right, but I think it is wrong in terms of the reputation of the profession.

The greatest difference between now and 1964, when I began teaching, is that public policy has pretty much eradicated the dream of Martin Luther King.

When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.

Thirty-six House incumbents with ratings from the AFL-CIO's Committee on Political Education of seventy-five or higher were defeated—especially traumatic since Republicans had filibustered labor's fondest legislative wish: a repeal of the right-to-work provision of the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act. Union members voted for politicians who weakened their unions because the Democrats supported civil rights.

We have talked long enough ... about civil rights,' Lyndon Johnson had said. 'It is time ... to write it in the books of law' - to embody justice and equality in legislation.

Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.

Martin Luther King, Jr., applied the same logic to the struggle for civil rights in America. "The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people but the silence over that by the good people.

States' rights, as our forefathers conceived it, was a protection of the right of the individual citizen. Those who preach most frequently about states' rights today are not seeking the protection of the individual citizen, but his exploitation. . . . The time is long past - if indeed it ever existed - when we should permit the noble concept of States' rights to be betrayed and corrupted into a slogan to hide the bald denial of American rights, of civil rights, and of human rights.

YOUNG: Self-appointed advisors have taken this line about Negro responsibility almost solely, and these are the very people who in the past have been largely indifferent to the plight of the Negro citizen, they've been people who fought against civil rights. I'm thinking of columnists like David Lawrence and Fulton Lewis. Now these are the people who speak of Negroes' assuming certain responsibilities before these rights are to be given.

she quickly hired a housekeeper and a kitchen staff for the White House and then threw herself into what mattered far more to her—civil rights, women's equality, poverty, housing, employment, and the war. She was the busiest, most public, most productive First Lady in history, and complaints about dinner just didn't register. But

The Grutter and Gratz decisions, taken together, represent a sad and tragic chapter in American history.

One thing 'not right' on the 50th anniversary of the Selma marches is the sad fact that the Edmund Pettus Bridge hasn't been renamed the John Lewis Bridge.