Quotes About Civil rights

At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.

Berry Gordy is a music legend, and we all know that, but I don't think Berry gets enough credit for his involvement with the civil rights movement.

There are those who say to you - we are rushing this issue of civil rights. I say we are 172 years late.

Black-on-black crime is a massive human rights issue that's going on in America.

The issue of human rights is one of the most fundamental human issues and also one of the most sensitive and controversial.

It's a good bet that if Jesse Jackson calls something a 'civil rights issue,' it's not.

I'd been going to jail for like, 10 years before the Stonewall.

Slavery was legal. Japanese interment was legal in this country. Segregation was legal.

We have always policed the bodies of people of color, and black people in particular. The Jim Crow South is a classic example. White flight in the North. School segregation. Gerrymandering.

I grew up hearing my parents' stories about how they had to fight for their right to vote in the Jim Crow South.

I am a lifelong Mississippian. I remember Jim Crow, 'colored' and 'white' water fountains, and my mother's inability to try on a dress in a store because no white woman would buy it if she put it back.

I did nothing worse than Lyndon Johnson. He was for segregation when he thought he had to be. I was for segregation, and I was wrong. The media has rehabilitated Johnson; why won't it rehabilitate me?

Obama's endorsement of gay marriage is hardly as consequential as Johnson's legislative success on civil rights.

I never remember, like, saying, 'Well, I'm going to belong - join the civil rights movement.'

Desegregation is a joke.

The ground which a colored man occupies in this country is, every inch of it, sternly disputed.

The relation subsisting between the white and colored people of this country is the great, paramount, imperative, and all-commanding question for this age and nation to solve.

We Negroes love our country. We fought for it. We ask only that we be treated as well as those who fought against it.

You can't kill an American Citizen without benefit of a trial." "I can if you're on the list, traitor." "LIST? What list? What the hell are you talking about?" BLACK LIST, July 24

Can a woman not walk with her possessions down the street of a city?

Disobedience is the true foundation of liberty.

The law will never make men free; it is men who have got to make the law free. They are the lovers of law and order who observe the law when the government breaks it.

Unjust laws exist; shall we be content to obey them? Or shall we endeavor to amend them and obey them until we have succeeded? Or shall we transgress them at once? — 1849 Essay on Civil Disobedience.

I still remember, 40 years ago, when I was shackled and put in prison... Being an American citizen didn't mean a thing.