Quotes About Civil rights

I'm going to have to bring up the nigger bill again. [Said to a southern U.S. Senator upon the occasion of the Republicans re-introducing the Civil Right Act of 1957, according to LBJ's Special Counsel Harry McPherson.]

We didn't land on plymouth rock, Plymouth rock landed on us.

Only the Democratic Party could lyingly claim credit for the Civil Rights Act—supported by more Republicans than Democrats—while having a former Klansman as their senior senator.

Democrats could never accept the fact that "civil rights" was about correcting specific and severe injustices done to American blacks, principally because they were the ones who had perpetrated the injustices.

One man who didn't like mob action even on behalf of civil rights was Thurgood Marshall. A skilled lawyer, he was redeeming civil rights for blacks the American way—by bringing lawsuits, making arguments, and winning in court. Marshall was the anti-Rousseau, using words, not pictures, to get justice. Martin

Thurgood Marshall was bringing lawsuits and winning case after case before the Supreme Court, including the 1954 case of Brown v. Board of Education. Redeeming blacks' civil rights could have been accomplished without riots, marches, church burnings, police dogs, and murders.

Do not let the focus on bakers and florists obscure this point: It is currently legal in most states to fire people for being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender; to refuse to rent them apartments or hotel rooms; even to refuse to tow their cars or repair their furnaces. Should this change? Anderson and Girgis argue that it should not. 4.3.5

Even as we continue to carry the banner of civil rights and environmental justice, we've also got to focus on many, many people - for them, life starts with a good job.

Individual civil disobedience was everybody's inherent right, like the right of self-defence in normal life.

In the years just after 9/11, even being breathed on by a suspected terrorist could land you in extralegal detention for the rest of your life.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 laid the foundation for the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it also addressed nearly every other aspect of daily life in a would-be free democratic society.

All of my life I have stayed away from violence and the instruments of violence, and have seen a legal, democratic struggle as the only means to achieve change.

John Lewis we all know was beaten terribly, almost to an inch of his life, opened doors that will never be closed, although there are forces that are attempting to close those doors.

We knew that in the end what they were clashing over was us, what to do with the blacks, and whether or not to start treating us as human beings.

We are the true friends of the negroes, always have been, and always will be, as long as they stay in the definite place we have provided for them.

it was the worldwide spread of American-style free enterprise that saved billions from poverty by giving them their first opportunity to rise in history. Truly, this is America's gift to the world. Conservatives can and must champion this truth without apology or compromise. For the sake of all people, our end goal must be to make free enterprise as universally accepted and nonpartisan as civil rights are today.

Meaningful progress toward social justice cannot be made in sclerotic education systems that put adults' job security before children's civil rights.

Access to a quality education in our country is a civil right for all Americans young and old. But to ensure it for scores of our fellow Americans, we must rethink education.

Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, 'What shall we do with the Negro?' I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us.

A free press is the cornerstone of democracy; there is no question about that.

We believe that the way you dress and the shoes you wear are not probable cause for questioning or arrest.

Particularly black Americans, many of them, from quotes that I have seen and conversations I've had, are sort of insulted that the civil rights movement is being hijacked - the rhetoric of the civil rights movement is being hijacked for something like same sex marriage. Black Americans tend to have a higher degree of religiosity.

Home to some of our nation's civil rights leaders, Harvard Law is not a bigoted hub of racism but a place where men and women of all races peacefully co-exist in pursuit of higher education.

Martin Luther King Jr. was not just a man of peace. He was a radical pacifist, and so he was against war across the board.