Quotes About Civil rights

The greatest achievement of the civil-rights movement is that it has restored the dignity of indignation.

A Negro has handicaps enough without having to pay taxes to support the education of white students to learn how to suppress him.

Education is the single-most important civil rights issue that we face today.

The chance to own a home; chance to own an education; chance to get access to capital. This is the real civil rights battle of the twenty-first century.

Slavery didn't end in 1865; it just evolved.

There can be no liberty without the law.

If it wasn't for Abe Lincoln, I'd still be on the open market.

We should understand the impact that Malcolm had on the whole of American society.

With 'Selma,' I grew up in Alabama, 45 minutes away from Selma. I have gone to that commemorative march many times with my parents.

I went to the library and found lots of material about this time, about the Freedom March and what was going on down there in 1964.

You can't, in the 21st century, continue to live in a system where people live under martial law for 30 years.

It defies reason to believe that Martin Luther King, Jr. would march arm in arm with Wall Street hedge fund managers and members of ALEC to lead a struggle for the privatization of public education, the crippling of unions, and the establishment of for-profit schools.

Last time I was down South I walked into this restaurant, and this white waitress came up to me and said: 'We don't serve colored people here.' I said: 'that's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.

Last time I was down South, I walked into this restaurant. This white waitress came up to me and said, 'We don't serve colored people here.' I said, 'That's all right, I don't eat colored people. Bring me a whole fried chicken.' About that time, these three cousins came in. You know the ones I mean, Ku, Klux and Klan. They said, 'Boy, we're givin' you fair warnin. Anything you do to that chicken, we're gonna do to you.' So I put down my knife and fork, picked up that chicken, and kissed it.

Because I'm a civil rights activist, I am also an animal rights activist. Animals and humans suffer and die alike. Violence causes the same pain, the same spilling of blood, the same stench of death, the same arrogant, cruel and vicious taking of life. We shouldn't be a part of it

Survey Graphic

The bad guys—the Democrats—put up a great fight but the Republicans won in the end. It was Republicans who made possible the Civil Rights laws that finally and belatedly secured equal rights for blacks and other minorities. Democrats are the ones who bitterly resisted the Civil Rights Movement, and had the Democrats been the only party in America at the time, none of these laws, from the Civil Rights Act to the Voting Rights Act to the Fair Housing Bill, would have passed.

Republicans, meanwhile, to one degree or another, all opposed slavery. The party itself was founded to stop slavery.

The institutions of black enslavement and white supremacy did not exist before Democrats in the South created them. The very same institutions then became the mechanisms that Democrats used to build their power, and also to repel and defeat attempts by Republicans to extend rights and opportunities to black Americans.

Goldwater objected to the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on libertarian grounds; he did not believe the federal government was constitutionally authorized to regulate discrimination in the private sector. Sadly, Goldwater's principled stand was misunderstood by many African Americans, who saw Goldwater as a racist and his party, the GOP, as the party of racism.

The Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth amendments were passed in the aftermath of the Civil War. They were passed by the Republican Party. The Republicans enacted these measures then to secure the freedom, equality, and social justice that Democrats keep harping on today. To further promote these goals, Republicans also implemented a series of Civil Rights laws: the Civil Rights Act of 1866, the Reconstruction Act of 1867, and the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871.

In this bogus narrative, Republicans are the bad guys because Republicans opposed the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. For progressive Democrats, the Civil Rights Movement is the canonical event of American history. It is even more important than the American Revolution. Progressive reasoning is: We did this, so it must be the greatest thing that was ever done in America. Republicans opposed it, which makes them the bad guys.

THE ORIGINAL CIVIL RIGHTS REVOLUTION Let's begin by examining the first civil rights revolution in America—the civil rights revolution of the 1860s. This was a Republican revolution, which is why progressive Democrats ignore it and pretend that the later revolution of the 1950s and 1960s is the only one. Yet of the two civil rights revolutions, the first—the ignored one—is actually more important.

The only problem is that Republicans were instrumental—actually indispensable—in getting the Civil Rights laws passed. While Lyndon Johnson pushed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with the backing of some northern Democrats, Republicans voted in far higher percentages for the bill than Democrats did. This was also true of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Neither would have passed with just Democratic votes. Indeed, the main opposition to both bills came from Democrats.