Quotes About Civil rights

When it came to political power, blacks need not apply. Add to this steaming stew the growing tensions over the Vietnam War and the movement for civil rights, and you had plenty of elements to fire the imagination of a novice journalist.

My dad was a civil rights lawyer, and he was actually defending conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War.

When the women's liberation movement began, when people began protesting against the Vietnam War, civil rights movement, at the beginning of those movements, the majority of the country was not with them, did not believe in the basic principles of any of those philosophies.

In 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act after hearings exposed the F.B.I.'s egregious practice of illegally spying on civil rights leaders, black nationalists, Communists and Vietnam War protesters.

I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn't qualify.

I think the NAACP isn't recognized enough for all of the work it does, especially in the field of law. They may have faded from view over the last couple of decades, but they are fighting the good fight.

Sometime in the not too distant future, denying gays the right to marry will be viewed as historically corrupt - as corrupt as denying slaves their freedom.

The religious Right went wrong by forgetting its religious and moral roots and going for political power; the civil rights movement was proven right in operating out of its spiritual strength and letting its political influence flow from its moral influence.

The Confederate flag had been raised above the South Carolina statehouse in 1962—in direct defiance of racial integration and the civil rights movement3—and has been used as an emblem of white hate and violence against black people ever since. It is therefore an anti-Christian flag that helped inspire the murder of black Christians on June 17, 2015.

I come before you to declare that my sex are entitled to the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

The Wisdom of W.E.B. Du Bois

The power of the ballot we need in sheer defense, else what shall save us from a second slavery?

The real meaning of courage was the personal sacrifice of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King.

[I]f we assume a liberty interest but nevertheless say that, even assuming a liberty interest, a state can prohibit it entirely, that would be rather a conundrum.

And who's next, Mr. and Mrs. America, now that the Bill of Rights is no longer the law of the land and the racial haters are running the show?

the early discrimination laws against the Jews—the "Jews Only" shops, park benches, rest rooms, and drinking fountains—were explicitly modeled on segregation laws in the United States.

Maybe for you in America, Dr. King has become boring because you hear about him so much. But for me, he is the man who has most inspired me.

My father was the first black Secret Service agent. He wanted to get into the FBI but J. Edgar Hoover, who was the head of the FBI, was a racist and he said we don't want any black people.

In 1965, I marched for equality.

Irrespective of where they lived, most white Americans before the civil rights era were indifferent to Jim Crow. Yet only in, and surrounding, the former Confederacy did the formal political system utilize race to exclude adults from citizenship and full access to civil society. Private terror combined with public law and enforcement to make this political system authentically totalitarian. Competitive party politics did not exist. Electoral contests were enacted inside the one dominant party.

Our own domestic Negro situation is another thing.

And what kind of liberty were they fighting for anyway? How much liberty and whose idea of liberty? Were they fighting for the liberty of eating free ice cream cones all their lives or for the liberty of robbing anybody they pleased whenever they wanted to or what? You tell a man he can't rob and you take away some of his liberty. You've got to. What the hell does liberty mean anyhow?

Justice John Marshall Harlan, who famously admonished his fellow jurists and the nation as a whole: "Our Constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful." More than a half century later, the Supreme Court would validate Harlan's humanity with a unanimous decision in Brown v.

June, Congress drew up and quickly passed the Fourteenth Amendment that would, once ratified by three-fourths of the states, safeguard the equal-citizenship provisions of the new Civil Rights Act by enshrining them in the Constitution. The amendment would protect the Civil Rights Act from the Supreme Court by invalidating the Dred Scott ruling that African-Americans were not citizens. Since the Constitution assigns the president no role in the amendment