Quotes About Civil rights

Our economic, civil, and constitutional rights are being challenged and, frankly, they are being lost.

The foundation of our democracy is the ability to have a debate about any subject. That is why I am so committed to defending free speech.

A state should protect citizens in general and women in particular. And in the 21st Century, every society needs to respect the individual choice of its members to decide freely about their bodies.

Diversity in books is a civil rights frontier.

We hold that same sex couples may exercise the fundamental right to marry in all states.

I was the first black child to desegregate the all-white William Frantz Elementary School in Louisiana in 1960.

I worked with James Orange and Hosea Williams as a teenager, and he's portrayed in the movie by Wendell Pierce. So, for me to be able to come in, 20 years after working with them as a teenager, and to portray Reverend James Orange in 'Selma' is mind-blowing.

On March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights activists marched in Selma, Alabama, demanding an end to racial discrimination. The demonstration was led by now-Rep. John Lewis and Hosea Williams, who worked with my father, Martin Luther King Jr.

The seminal right of the modern civil rights movement was the right to vote. My father fought so diligently for it. Certainly Congressman John Lewis and many others, Hosea Williams, fought for it as well.

If Willie Nelson had been Rosa Parks, there never would have been a civil rights movement in this country, because he refuses to leave the back of the bus.

I don't want to harm my government. I want to help my government. But the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society and say, 'Hey, this is not appropriate.'

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.

I was down in Wilmington, Delaware, doing 'The Desk Set' with Shirley Booth. I was at the DuPont Hotel. I walked out, and there was this grill next door called the New England Grill. I loved seafood. They said very nicely, 'We don't serve colored people.'

Many have fought for and even lost their lives to end segregation, to win the right to vote. It disappoints me to now have to cajole people to register and to vote.

White people get to do that all of the time. They get to engage in bad behavior, even felonious behavior, but they rarely wind up in jail. But as a black person, losing your temper can cost you your life. Or insisting on your rights can cost you your life.

This has been the new normal since September 11. Everyone knows, but nobody says, that if something happens again, the elite consensus in this country, and the overwhelming consensus of the citizenry, will be to pitch the Bill of Rights out the window and start rounding folks up.

Civil Rights opened the windows. When you open the windows, it does not mean that everybody will get through. We must create our own opportunities.

In 1974, when the city of Boston was desegregating its schools, I watched the news with my dad and saw the police escorts in riot gear, the protesters screaming at the buses, small frightened faces in their windows.

Due to broken windows policing, the following interactions can lead to tickets, arrests and summonses, warrants if tickets go unpaid and, in some cases, violence: jaywalking, sleeping on a park bench, spitting, putting your feet up on the subway, and more.

In Windsor in the forties, and even up into the fifties and sixties, if you were black, you had to sit in the balcony of the theatres, and you couldn't buy property in most places.

You know what Americans are really sensitive to? Issues of fairness. I think this is a modern phenomenon, born of the civil rights movement. Once you convince Americans that something is basically unfair, you've got a winning cause.

If you look at attitudes today and where they are headed, it's clear to me that supporting equal rights, including the rights to civil marriage, is a net positive for winning elections, as well as the right thing to do.

The first thing I said to myself on 9/11 was, 'There go our civil rights.' I found out by comparing notes later that George Carlin and I both said that at the exact same time. That's the first thing that popped into our head.