Quotes About Civil rights

There were many African Americans - many, many stories similar to my story.

My image had always been very heterosexual, very straight. So it was a nice experience for me, a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian civil rights.

I like the idea of amending the 1964 Civil Rights Act to include a ban of discrimination based on sexual orientation. It would be simple. It would be straightforward.

I was no stranger to racism. Having grown up a black person in the '60s and '70s, I knew that prejudice was common.

This formal system of racial preference was codified from the 1600s until at least the mid-to-late '60s, when the nation passed civil rights legislation, at least theoretically establishing equality in employment, voting, and housing opportunity.

There were still men walking the streets of 1922 Indiana who had fought against the slaveholders, and who believed that liberating humans held as property had been the highest calling of their lives. Among them was William H. Stern, a white man raised on a farm north of Indianapolis.

It came about that American citizens in Indiana were judged by their religion, condemned because of their race, illegally punished because of their opinions, hounded because of their personal conduct, and a state of terror was substituted for a state of law.

At least fifty people were taken down to the Trinity River bottoms in Dallas for whippings and acid brandings. Should they call the police, they would be reporting something already known and even encouraged within the blue wall, for a majority of Dallas officers were now oath-bound members of the hooded order. Proof of Malcolm X's later observation that the Klan had 'changed its bedsheets for a policeman's uniform

Jim Crow was a bipartisan crime.

The Autobiography of Malcolm X,

It never occurred to me that I was not going to challenge segregation.

What happened to George Floyd is an abomination. Four Minneapolis policemen used excessive force to cause his death in what appears to be a tragically cavalier fashion. All four officers involved should be held fully accountable and incarcerated for their crimes.

We have a problem with our democracy when you have election officials deliberately trying to take away the fundamental right to vote in this country in the 21st century.

My parents had to go to Ohio to get married in 1965 because it was still illegal in Mississippi. My white father and black mother.

Respectfully, the civil rights movement for people with disabilities is modeled on the African American civil rights movement. I'm old enough to remember 1964. I was a junior in high school.

I think as a whole America is dealing with the issue of homophobia. We got to be really honest about whether we believe in civil rights for all people or not. As Black people we need to remember the moment that we say it's okay to disenfranchise one segment of society, we're opening the door to move backward on ourselves.

Opening a complaint for investigation in no way implies that the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has made a determination about the merits of the complaint.

I went to Zanzibar on holiday and there was a lot there about civil rights and there was a museum, where there are old slave chambers. It was horrible to go to and they've still got the chains there. It opens your eyes a lot.

We are now operating a school system in America that's more segregated than at any time since the death of Martin Luther King.

We meet from time to talk and argue…about what we as artists can do, how we can express the anguish for the moral situation we find in this country, but not as civil rights pleaders.

A generation or so after slavery ended, segregationists enacted Jim Crow laws that made it impossible for most blacks to vote in the South.

I'm very fond of the concept of choice as the basis for sexual preference. This point of view is unpopular in an era in which every claim for gay rights is bases on pseudoscientific sulking about how we can't help being queer; we're just born that way. Thanks, but I don't want to receive my civil rights as a charity fuck bequeathed on me by my genetic superiors.

Black man invented plasma. Fellow named Charles Drew. I read somewhere that he bled to death after a car accident in the nineteen fifties because some cracker North Carolina hospital didn't have any 'Negro blood' in the fridge and refused to give him 'white blood.

In the summer of 1964, my sister and I went to South Ballston, Virginia, to stay with my aunt and her kids. They passed the civil rights bill that summer; my cousins were so happy because now they could swim in the pool.