Quotes About Civil rights

We need to end voter suppression and protect access to the ballot. We need to teach the truth about white supremacy in our classrooms. And we must prioritize Black liberation in its totality. Only then will we be truly free.

Particularly in the South, efforts continue to be made to deny blacks access to the polls, even where blacks constitute the majority of the voters.

Selma helped make it possible for hundreds and thousands of people in the South to become registered voters and encouraged people all across America to become participants in a democratic process.

I'm a member of the Michigan Democratic Party, a DSA member, member of the League of Women Voters, ACLU.

2021 is starting to look like 1961 - a segregated America.

The segregated schools of today are arguably no more equal than the segregated schools of the past.

What is our greatest enemy? Segregation.

I never knew about racial segregation until Martin Luther King.

It's good that segregation is over.

I've never said that you should have segregation of the school system or any other.

I come up in a segregated 1943 atmosphere of segregation.

Separate but equal does not work.

Police and prosecutors are morally and professionally obligated to make every effort to identify specious rape reports, safeguard the civil rights of rape suspects, and prevent the falsely accused from being convicted. At the same time, however, police and prosecutors are obligated to do everything in their power to identify individuals who have committed rape and ensure that the guilty are brought to justice. These two objectives are not mutually exclusive.

When the nation sees differently, it enhances its capacity to act differently. From Seneca Falls to Selma to Stonewall, America has gradually expanded who's included when the country speaks of "We the People.

He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows

It's tempting to romanticize the words King spoke before the Lincoln Memorial. To do so, however, cheapens the courage of the nonviolent soldiers of freedom who faced—and too often paid—the ultimate price for daring America to live up to the implications of the Declaration of Independence and become a country in which liberty was innate and universal, not particular to station, creed, or color.

It will then have been proved that, among free men, there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and that they who take such appeal are sure to lose their case, and pay the cost.

The message of the civil rights movement was straightforward, and it was a message grounded in hope: We are one people; we are one family; we all live in the same house—the American house, the world house.

George Washington and Patrick Henry had resorted to arms to win their liberty—so, Malcolm X argued, why shouldn't African Americans be able to draw on that example in the face of fear, intimidation, and brutality?

For Lewis, the civil rights struggle always centered on whether the best of the American soul (the grace and the love, the godliness and the generosity) could finally win out over the worst (the racism and the hatred, the fear and the cruelty).

the only genuine obstacle to the rise of socialism or communism in America." Civil rights, Thurmond declared, were a Red plot against the Free World: "Only the States Rights Democrats—and we alone—have the moral courage to stand up to the Communists and tell them this foreign doctrine will not work in free America.

One point of this book is to remind us that imperfection is the rule, not the exception. On Thursday, December 1, 1955, Rosa Parks, who worked as a seamstress at the Montgomery Fair department store, was arrested after refusing to give up her seat to a white passenger in Jim Crow–era Alabama.

Judge Ted Poe's critics—like the civil rights group the ACLU—argued to him the dangers of these ostentatious punishments, especially those that were carried out in public. They said it was no coincidence that public shaming had enjoyed such a renaissance in Mao's China and Hitler's Germany and the Ku Klux Klan's America—it destroys souls, brutalizing everyone, the onlookers included, dehumanizing them as much as the person being shamed.

To give the victory to the right, not bloody bullets, but peaceful ballots only, are necessary.