Quotes About Civil rights

If it hadn't been for that march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, there would be no Barack Obama as President of the United States of America.

You can't separate the phenomenal birth of unionism in the United States of America from the Pullman porters. This same small group of men, who grew to be 10,000 strong, was also the organizational foundation for the civil rights movement and all of the gains that were made in the '40s and the '50s. That, and the black church.

I cannot understand how the education of this United States of America has been fooled time and time again. Either make it separate but equal or integrate, therefore it will be equal. And it has been separate and unequal.

One of the greatest men to ever walk this land was Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. His life exemplified unity by bringing people together for the good of all. In any small way I hope to someday bring people together like Dr. King.

Our Declaration of Independence was held sacred by all and thought to include all; but now, to aid in making the bondage of the Negro universal and eternal, it is assailed, sneered at, construed, hawked at, and torn, till, if its framers could rise from their graves, they could not at all recognize it.

Dr. King's general principles are universal. But the things he confronted took place in another era.

All Southern state colleges and universities are open to black students.

When I was growing up, our nation was partitioned: Blacks were segregated by law in the South and largely by custom in the North, though it, too, had segregation laws. Our best universities had quota systems. Many white communities had real estate covenants to keep nonwhites out.

I think I first learned about Stonewall in Queer Theatre class at the University of Pittsburgh. It made me mad that queer people out at bars could be raided and arrested and harassed by the police just for being who they were.

I first met Dr. King in 1954 when I was a student at Alabama State University and a member of a local church down there. He was in town to organize a rally against public transportation. Rosa Parks had been arrested for refusing to give up her seat to a white man, which was illegal back then.

We had teachers, we had high school principals, we had people teaching in colleges and university in Tuskegee, Alabama. But they were told they failed the so-called literacy test.

Oh, Diane Nash deserves her own film. Diane Nash is a freedom fighter who is still alive and kicking. She was one of the leaders of the desegregation of Nashville, basically. She was a student at Fisk University who was one of the founding members of SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.

The attorney general would call at 5 o'clock in the evening and say: 'Tomorrow morning we are going to try to integrate the University of Mississippi. Get us a memo on what we're likely to do, and what we can do if the governor sends the National Guard there.'

Just because someone gets arrested doesn't mean what they are doing is wrong. Some laws are unfair and unjust.

It was clear to me as a civil rights leader in the '60s that unless we put the social and economic underpinnings beneath the political and the civil rights, we wouldn't go anywhere.

The only position for women in SNCC is prone.

We are free to say that in respect to political rights, we hold women to be justly entitled to all we claim for men.

Men and women were declared equal one morning and everybody could divorce each other by postcard

Every discrimination against women in the constitutions and laws of the several States is today null and void, precisely as in every one against Negroes.

Newsman are the ones who - without them we don't have a civil rights movement, we don't have a women's movement, we don't have a Vietnam movement.

When Blacks got the right to vote, white women got the right to sit on juries.

My father has a pragmatic mind. He marched with Dr King in the 60s, and he's very much for women's rights.

The Freedom Riders literally put their lives and limbs on the line in order to bring about an America that lives up to its own stated ideals. They are nothing short of American patriots, and honoring them more than 60 years after their historic acts is the least we can do.

When I was going to gay bars in my 20s and 30s, the older guys there explained to me that the police would occasionally raid these places and march the clients out, load them onto paddy wagons, drive them down to the station, photograph them, fingerprint them and put their names on a list. They were doing nothing wrong, and it was criminalized.