Quotes About Civil rights

My friend Patsy Mink was a champion for social and economic justice, equality and civil rights for women and marginalized communities. She was a trailblazer who never backed down from a challenge and whose work in Hawaii and Congress brought positive change to the lives of women, children, and minorities in Hawaii and across the country.

The most memorable interviews for me are folks whose names I don't know: young civil rights leaders in the South, showing great courage as they walked into a town in the dark of night. A doctor working for 'Doctors Without Borders' in Somalia, operating by kerosene light in a tent. Those are the kinds of people that linger in your memory.

I went to jail 44 times. I've been beaten and left for dead on the side of the road fighting for freedom... Yet Rosa Parks is better known in history than Ralph David Abernathy. Why is that?

I was told by the general manager that a white player had received a higher raise than me. Because white people required more money to live than black people. That is why I wasn't going to get a raise.

We have a tendency to sugar coat the Civil Rights movement by showing arm in arm and everyone singing 'Kumbaya'. We don't really always show the resistance from the government, the resistance from the status quo, from the majority to silence the movement.

I was one of the first three black students to go to an all-white school in Tennessee.

We who engage in nonviolent direct action are not the creators of tension. We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive.

For my grandfather, there was no distinction. There was no tension between his support for civil rights for black people and his animus toward gay people because both of those positions were scripturally derived.

When I was 15 years old and in the tenth grade, I heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at that time. As I got more and more involved, I saw politics as a means of bringing about change.

A lot of these things in this world were only a dream for Martin Luther King. Not a one-term, but a two-term African-American president. And this is a terrible country? That was a dream for Martin Luther King.

This thing called Patriot Act, through which we abdicated a lot of our civil rights to defend the country against terrorism, it's a four-year story.

We are on the lookout for criminal and terrorist activity but we do not - nor will we ever - monitor ideology or political beliefs. We take seriously our responsibility to protect the civil rights and liberties of the American people, including subjecting our activities to rigorous oversight from numerous internal and external sources.

If the events of September 11, 2001, have proven anything, it's that the terrorists can attack us, but they can't take away what makes us American - our freedom, our liberty, our civil rights. No, only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that.

Since the ousting and capture of Saddam Hussein by U.S. forces, civil rights and personal freedoms have been restored in Iraq, as well as equal rights to all, not just to Saddam's entourage of terrorists.

The NRA is interested in protecting the civil rights of Americans, not protecting the ability of terrorists to get guns.

As the Democratic Party came to be identified as the party of civil rights, white Christians increasingly moved to the Republican Party—a migration that political scientists have dubbed "the great white switch.

The stances of white churches on the issue of integration were seen by civil rights activists and segregationists alike as the keystone holding the entire Jim Crow edifice together.

In the twentieth century men everywhere like to breathe; and the Negro citizen still cannot, you see, breathe.

I think it's very simple that the whole idea of debating whether or not Negroes should defend themselves is an insult.

Laws are made to free people, not to bind them - if they are the proper laws. They tell each of us what he may do without transgressing on the equal liberty of any other man.

Sam wasn't allowed to attend classes because he was a Negro

Rosa Parks was a woman of strength, conviction, and morality. Her action on December 1, 1955, to defy the law made her a leading figure in our nation's civil rights history.

I thought black people superior people. Not simply superior to white people, because even without thinking about it much, I assumed almost everyone was superior to them; but to everyone. Only white people, after all, would blow up a Sunday school class and grin for television over their victory, i.e. , the death of four small black girls.

At first, ordinary citizens had taken matters into their own hands against this Yellow Peril. In Los Angeles, twenty-one Chinese people were shot,197 hanged, or burned alive by white mobs, while in San Francisco, officials tried to forcibly move everyone in Chinatown into an area reserved for pig farms and other businesses that were designated as dirty and disease-ridden, until the courts ruled the policy was unconstitutional.198