Quotes About Civil rights

What we're about is the belief that access to affordable and real-time health information is a basic human right, and it's a civil right.

I knew that I could vote and that that wasn't a privilege; it was my right. Every time I tried I was shot, killed or jailed, beaten or economically deprived.

During the 1950s the ideological battles were centered on "loyalty," "subversion," "communism," and civil rights. While politics of the decade seemed intense, it was also narrower: socioeconomic problems were subordinated to ideological battles in which anticommunist ideologues did their best to link liberalism, the main force behind socioeconomic reform, with communism.46

It's soul force that removed the English from India. It's soul force that brought down the Berlin Wall. It's soul force that gave life to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s struggle for civil rights.

If by a "Liberal" they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people-their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights and their civil liberties-someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal", then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal.

The civil rights movement, owes Bull Connor as much as it owes Abraham Lincoln

It is in the American tradition to stand up for one's rights - even if the new way to stand up for one's rights is to sit down

The civil rights movement in the United States was about the same thing, about equality of treatment for all sections of the people, and that is precisely what our movement was about.

The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith. We saw ourselves doing the work of the Almighty. Segregation and racial discrimination were not in keeping with our faith, so we had to do something.

Get in trouble, necessary trouble, and help redeem the soul of America.

Nay, if we may openly speak the truth, and as becomes one man to another, neither Pagan nor Mahometan, nor Jew, ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the commonwealth because of his religion.

Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal.

Resolved, That it is the duty of the women of this country to secure to themselves their sacred right to the elective franchise.

I knew that my parents were civil rights partisans. I was proud of the night my father had spent in jail in the 1950s, arrested and charged with "inciting to riot." He and a buddy had stood on a front porch in a white part of town, trying to protect the new black homeowners within from a rock-throwing mob on the lawn. It seemed the Jewish thing to do.

When people are forced to respect civil rights and human rights or face legal consequences, they don't like it. Civil rights laws will be scrupulously observed only when people accept that it is morally wrong to oppress or discriminate against fellow human beings. That awareness can come only through education. A law will enable integration in public places, but it does not foster understanding or appreciation in the hearts of people who continue to live with their prejudices.

When Angela Davis came to new jersey to do a speaking engagement on my behalf, the new jersey prosecutor's office ambushed her and her party, harassing them until the moment they left the state.

Northern whites were more than happy at the prospect of Black people fighting in the war. A popular verse published in the newspapers of the day reflected the sentiment of many Northerners: Some say it is a burnin' shame To make the naygurs fight An' that the trade o' bein' kilt Belongs but to the white; But as for me upon me sowl, So liberal are we here, I'll let Sambo be murthered in place o' meself On every day in the year.

The trial began on January 17, 1977, the same day Gary Gilmore was shot in Utah. Gary Gilmore was the first person legally executed since the death penalty was struck down by the u.s. supreme kourt in the early 1970s. His execution set the climate for the trial.

Rarely in my 45 years as a civil rights lawyer have I been so angry about an injustice as I am about what happened to Billy Ray Johnson.

My father marched in Selma. My father was there in Alabama. That's where I was born. My birth certificate says 'colored.' It does not say I'm African-American or black. So for me, those are real realities that are not subject to opinion.

The closer a Negro got to the ballot box, the more he looked like a rapist.

A government is for the benefit of all the people.

If anyone should do any pardoning. I should be the one pardoning the government for what they did to the Japanese-American people.