Quotes About Civil rights

TODAY I WANT TO TELL THE CITY OF SELMA, TODAY I WANT TO SAY TO THE STATE OF ALABAMA, TODAY I WANT TO SAY TO THE PEOPLE OF AMERICA AND THE NATIONS OF THE WORLD, THAT WE ARE NOT ABOUT TO TURN AROUND.

Floods of consumer goods, superhighways, supermarkets, and Telstars [satellites] do not obscure the existence of shameful prejudice.

The daily life of the Negro is still lived in the basement of the Great Society. He is still at the bottom despite the few who have penetrated to slightly higher levels. Even where the door has been forced partially open, mobility for the Negro is still sharply restricted. There is often no bottom at which to start, and when there is, there is almost always no room at the top.

Nonviolence, the answer to the Negroes' need, may become the answer to the most desperate need of all humanity.

In 1963, Birmingham was often called the most segregated city in America.

Their objectives included the elimination of Birmingham's rigid segregation. They wanted the right to vote. They wanted jobs and the ability to try on clothes in all the places where they shopped. They wanted public schools opened to all children without regard to the color of their skin.

Why does misery constantly haunt the Negro?

I had been fighting too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns.

We don't want to be integrated out of power; we want to be integrated into power.

He was impatient to be free.

What we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system, rather than merely withdrawing our economic support from the bus company.

One old domestic, an influential matriarch to many young relatives in Montgomery, was asked by her wealthy employer, "Isn't this bus boycott terrible?" The old lady responded: "Yes, ma'am, it sure is. And I just told all my young'uns that this kind of thing is white folks' business and we just stay off the buses till they get this whole thing settled.

Martin Luther King, Jr.

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

As a consequence of combining direct and legal action, far-reaching precedents were established, which served, in turn, to extend the areas of desegregation. Why We Can't Wait, 1963

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

If a person is homosexual by nature - that is, if one's sexuality is as intrinsic a part of one's identity as gender or skin color - then society can no more deny a gay person access to the secular rights and religious sacraments because of his homosexuality than it can reinstate Jim Crow.

If the events of September 11, 2001, have proven anything, it's that the terrorists can attack us, but they can't take away what makes us American -- our freedom, our liberty, our civil rights. No, only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that.

If the events of September 11, 2001, have proven anything, it's that the terrorists can attack us, but they can't take away what makes us American -- our freedom, our liberty, our civil rights. No, only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that.

Pigmentation was a quick and convenient way of judging a person. One of us, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once proposed we instead judge people by the content of their character. He was shot.

We were marching against the humiliation of the fact that your money can't buy a hot dog, can't rent a Holiday Inn. It was sense of the dollar dignity. We weren't fighting just to be with white people.

In an essay for the Saturday Review, a magazine that appealed to economically comfortable, upper-middlebrow readers, King wrote: "The flames of Watts illuminated more than the western sky; they cast light on the imperfections in the civil rights movement and the tragic shallowness of white racial policy in the explosive ghettos.

Liberalism seemed so obviously ethical. Liberals marched for peace, workers' rights, civil rights, and secularism. The Republican Party was (as we saw it) the party of war, big business, racism, and evangelical Christianity. I could not understand how any thinking person would voluntarily embrace the party of evil, and so I and my fellow liberals looked for psychological explanations of conservatism, but not liberalism.

When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.