Quotes About Civil rights

The freedom of thought and expression is one of the most sacred rights in this country.

I regard freedom of expression as the primary right without which one can not have a proper functioning democracy.

Martin Luther King (Jr.) during the civil rights movement used to exclaim that he looked forward to heaven where he would be "Free at last." That is the inscription on his tomb in Atlanta.

And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

Negroes must be free in order to be equal, and they must be equal in order to be free... Men cannot win freedom unless they win equality. They cannot win equality unless they win freedom.

His headstone said Free at last, Free at last - But death is a slave's freedom - We seek the freedom of free men - And the construction of a world - Where Martin Luther King could have lived - and preached non-violence

A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman... They are both... lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties and ultimately destroyers of a free America.

The Negro's great stumbling block in the drive toward freedom is not the White Citizens Councilor or the Ku Klux Klanner but the white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice.

Free at last; free at last; thank God Almighty we are free at last.

Baseball is very big with my people. It figures. It's the only way we can get to shake a bat at a white man without starting a riot.

Martin Luther King, Jr. Day is a time to honor the greatest champion of racial equality who taught a nation - through compassion and courage - about democracy, nonviolence and racial justice.

Gone are the days when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. declared: "I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."48

wrote what is considered by radical activists a seminal essay in the far-left Nation, entitled "The Weight of the Poor: A Strategy to End Poverty," focused on race and poverty. They bluntly stated their intention: "It is our purpose to advance a strategy which affords the basis for a convergence of civil rights organizations,

I do not think white America is committed to granting equality to the American Negro. This is a passionately racist country it will continue to be so in the foreseeable future.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

We need to guarantee equal rights and civil rights and say that, here in America, workers have the right to organize - women have the right to choose - and justice belongs to everyone regardless of race or gender or sexual orientation.

1949, Mexican American civil rights activists sought to challenge the exclusion of Mexican Americans from funeral homes reserved for white citizens. This time they met with mixed results. The governor's office refused to assist them, yet they obtained the political support of Senator Lyndon B. Johnson, and their struggle received national attention.

Overall, out of the nineteen senior public colleges in Texas, seven had desegregated by 1959, and twelve refused to do so. Desegregation

A new era, however, began toward the end of Reconstruction when the US Supreme Court's ruling in the Slaughter-House Cases (1873) gave state legislatures the authority to determine what actions constituted violations of a person's civil rights. The

In the aftermath of the Slaughter-House Cases ruling, the Texas Legislature and state courts passed laws giving clubs, organizations, and businesses the authority to refuse entry or services to any person, for any reason.

The federal government could intervene in civil rights disputes only when a state violated political rights associated with citizenship. After the Slaughter-House Cases ruling, state assemblies went far beyond passing segregation legislation aimed at keeping African Americans apart from whites.74 They passed exclusionary laws discriminating against Jews, Mexican Americans, Native Americans, and Asian Americans.

When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir . . . America has defaulted on this promissory note in so far as her citizens of color are concerned.

I submit that an individual who breaks a law that conscience tells him is unjust, and who willingly accepts the penalty of imprisonment in order to arouse the conscience of the community over its injustice, is in reality expressing the highest respect for law.

Ordinarily, a person leaving a courtroom with a conviction behind him would wear a somber face. But I left with a smile. I knew that I was a convicted criminal, but I was proud of my crime.