Quotes About Civil rights

Ordinarily, a person leaving a courtroom with a conviction behind him would wear a somber face. But I left with a smile. I knew that I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime.

Classifications and distinctions based on race or color have no moral or legal validity in our society. They are contrary to our constitution and laws.

If this is a Great Society, I'd hate to see a bad one.

Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.

Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.

Homosexuality is not a civil right. Its rise almost always is accompanied, as in the Weimar Republic, with a decay of society and a collapse of its basic cinder block, the family.

Brown is the definitive example of the fate of civil rights policies that were sought with too little regard for either the variables of racial fortuity or the tremendous obstacles those we hoped to help were actually facing in their lives.

At bottom, though, Brown helped maintain a stable society by moving it forward, far less than civil rights advocates had hoped but far more than opponents felt was needed or necessary.

A state that has denied opportunity for quality education for Negroes has no right to demand literacy as a prerequisite for voting

state that has denied opportunity for quality education for Negroes has no right to demand literacy as a prerequisite for voting

Baseball is very big with my people. It figures. It's the only way we can get to shake a bat at a white man without starting a riot.

Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant. This White waitress came up to me and said, "We don't serve colored people here." I said, "That's all right, I don't eat colored people, no way! Bring me a whole fried chicken."

I believe the equal rights amendment is a necessity of life for all citizens. The cabinet sometimes felt that I shouldn't be so outspoken.

No one," Ben noted, "would have known about James Chaney if he had been by himself.

In many ways, history is marked as 'before' and 'after' Rosa Parks. She sat down in order that we all might stand up, and the walls of segregation came down.

As black people, we must recognize that our real battle is with ourselves, not with society. It is not racism but the civil rights establishment, with its victim-centered mentality and irrational fury at white America that mentally cripples blacks, teaching them to find the means of success outside of themselves in government programs, and urging them to find the origin of their greatest problems in white society.

The great irony, rarely recognized, is that abortion in America was initially conceived and advocated for the purpose of reducing the black population. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and one of the champions of the abortion rights movement, was an unapologetic eugenicist and a racist, and wanted minorities and the poor to have abortions.

Well, my personal mission statement is that we want marriage equality in all 50 states. We want it not to be a state-by-state issue. We don't want it to be something the majority is voting on. I don't think the civil rights of any minority should be in the hands of any majority.

I'm an admirer of everything Dr. Martin Luther King stood for, but I don't think he would have stood for this

I grew up in the southern United States in a city which at that time during the late '40's and early '50's was the most segregated city in the country, and in a sense learning how to oppose the status quo was a question of survival.

Yes, I think it's really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.

opinion and perception and to be allowed to live and express those perceptions is at the supposed core of the American state. Reproductive freedom must be understood as a civil right.

I will never forget the first time I was teargassed or the night I hid under my steering wheel as the SWAT vehicle drove down a residential street. I will never forget that it was illegal - in St Louis, in the fall of 2014 - to stand still.

Whenever people ask me: 'Why didn't you get up when the bus driver asked you?' I say it felt as though Harriet Tubman's hands were pushing me down on one shoulder and Sojourner Truth's hands were pushing me down on the other shoulder. I felt inspired by these women because my teacher taught us about them in so much detail.