Quotes About Civil rights

Crooks avoided the whole subject now. "Maybe you guys better go," he said. "I ain't sure I want you in here no more. A colored man got to have some rights even if he don't like 'em.

Laws aren't ghosts in this country, they walk around with the smell of earth on them.

Our children need to be able to see us take a stand for a value and against injustices, be those values and injustices in the family room, the boardroom, the classroom, or on the city streets.

Where I come from, if you see your family and friends' civil rights being taken away, you speak up and do everything you can to keep that from happening!

My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit.

I saw my father march with Martin Luther King.

Congress also kicked around a constitutional amendment in 2004, the Marriage Protection Amendment (MPA) (formerly known as the Federal Marriage Amendment), which would have banned all gay marriages in the United States.18 It is a classic example of elected representatives using religion and religion only to justify a law. Representative

At the steamy train station in New Orleans, horrifying signs above drinking fountains announce: COLORED. WHITE. Confused, I drink out of both. Why should it matter if a stream of coo, refreshing water pours into my mouth or another?

The media wants to call them riots, but they're uprisings. Why should black people behave well to get their rights? White people don't behave and they get all the rights they want.

I call it Negroland because I still find "Negro" a word of wonders, glorious and terrible. A word for runaway slave posters and civil rights proclamations; for social constructs and street corner flaunts. A tonal-language word whose meaning shifts as setting and context shift, as history twists, lurches, advances, and stagnates. As capital letters appear to enhance its dignity; as other nomenclatures

It was very clear to me in 1965, in Mississippi, that, as a lawyer, I could get people into schools, desegregate the schools, but if they were kicked off the plantations - and if they didn't have food, didn't have jobs, didn't have health care, didn't have the means to exercise those civil rights, we were not going to have success.

There is no justification for taking away individuals' freedom in the guise of public safety.

The Supreme Court kept me from my freedom.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

Any time we deny any citizen the full exercise of his constitutional rights, we are weakening our own claim to them.

People are dying in vain because America isn't holding their end of the bargain up, as far as giving freedom and justice, liberty to everybody. That's something that's not happening.

I do not undertake to promote welfare, for I propose to extend freedom. My aim is not to pass laws but to repeal them.

The sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.

I want every American to be free to stand up for his rights, even if sometimes he has to sit down for them.

Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry.

We have no right to prejudice another in his civil enjoyments because he is of another church.

As far as I am concerned, freedom summer never really ended.

What the USA Freedom Act did is it did two things. Number one, it ended the federal government's bulk collection of phone metadata of millions of law-abiding citizens.

The police of a state should never be stronger or better armed than the citizenry. An armed citizenry, willing to fight, is the foundation of civil freedom. That's a personal evaluation, of course.