Quotes About Civil rights

King had come to Memphis to lend his moral authority to the struggle of striking municipal sanitation workers who were overwhelmingly African-American. They earned poverty wages, endured degrading working conditions, and faced brutal beatings when they tried to organize.

I'd been in jail, and I'd been beat. I had been to a voter registration workshop, you know, to - they were just training and teaching us how to register, to pass the literacy test.

I remember back in the 1960s - late '50s, really - reading a comic book called 'Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Story.' Fourteen pages. It sold for 10 cents. And this little book inspired me to attend non-violence workshops, to study about Gandhi, about Thoreau, to study Martin Luther King, Jr., to study civil disobedience.

Our nation has slashed budgets for education, job training, economic development, and drug treatment while investing billions in prisons and militarized police. A penal system unprecedented in world history has been born. Millions have been arrested and stripped of basic civil and human rights.

My father's leadership was about more than civil rights. He was deeply concerned with human rights and world peace, and he said so on numerous occasions. He was a civil rights leader, true. But he was increasingly focused on human rights and a global concern and peace as an imperative.

I am prepared to oppose a Jim Crow army till I rot in jail.

I was born in a ghetto on the North Side of Pittsburgh. I was born as Emmett Till was dying and the civil rights era was being born.

We need to end qualified immunity at the federal level, where police can violate a person's civil rights with impunity, which we've seen happening time and time again.

I've done a lot of research about the Civil Rights movement, and I'm fascinated with how difficult it would have been for a black man to show feelings toward a white woman in that time period.

I've always found the rhetoric of mainstream civil rights leaders and organizations to be far too timid, accommodationist, and gradualist. It always seemed to me that they behaved like meek and gentle supplicants begging the oppressor for a few crumbs of justice, for a few molecules of citizenship rights.

The Obama years will be remembered as a cultural - and legal - tipping point for equality for all people who do not identify as strictly heterosexual, arguably the civil rights movement of our times. The president signed the bill repealing 'don't ask, don't tell.' The Defense of Marriage Act was struck down by the Supreme Court.

I'm tired of being considered some kind of criminal or dangerous throwback for no other reason than that I value, exercise, and defend my rights under the first ten Amendments to the United States Constitution.

Connecticut is proud of the human rights legacy of Thomas Dodd, and the work of the University of Connecticut to build on that legacy through the Dodd Human Rights Impact initiative. We are also proud of our Commission on Human and Civil Rights as a tireless defender of the equal rights for all of our community members.

The Court today completes the process of converting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for often will.

Let us listen to the lesson of Martin Luther King, who wrote: "The movement does not seek to liberate blacks at the price of the humiliation of the whites. It wants to liberate American society and to help all people to liberate themselves.

I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, 'Hey man, we don't go for that anymore.'

The Civil Rights for Musicians Act is about economic justice for African American artists. It's about what's right. And it's about time.

Having a separate bathroom for the black domestic was just the way things were done. It had faded out in new homes by the time the '70s and '80s rolled up.

If the government can't get the black man justice, then it's time for the black man to get some justice for himself.

The argument of those who are being criticized at any time, the civil rights movement forward, the anti-war movement forward, is, it's always outside agitators doing it.

the Jim Crow South, often the plates off which black people had eaten were broken so that they could not be used again. Baseball great Hank Aaron describes this common practice in his autobiography, noting, "If dogs had eaten off those plates, they'd have washed them."21 So the US South had convoluted and bizarre practices regarding food: blacks could cook and serve food for whites, but they were thought to contaminate the plates they themselves used.

We have fought hard and long for integration, as I believe we should have, and I know that we will win. But I've come to believe we're integrating into a burning house.

Free at last, Free at last, Thank God almighty we are free at last.

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 the law