Quotes About Civil rights

made a point of sitting in a Whites Only chair in the Whites Only waiting room.

Even in the United States, after all, what brought equal rights to blacks wasn't the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments passed after the Civil War, but rather the grassroots civil rights movement nearly one hundred years later. Laws matter, but typically changing the law by itself accomplishes little.

Even as he took firm and reassuring command of the federal government, Johnson began to recast the civil rights struggle from a legal question to a ringing moral issue.* With a credibility that no northerner could claim, Johnson took his case for equal rights directly to the South.

The signs were everywhere, it seemed. What it meant depended on which god you worshipped. The God of Denial, the God of Revenge, the God of Beauty, Prosperity, Youth. All shared the same name—God will lift you up. God will strike you down!—but it wasn't possible that White Supremacist Jesus and Civil Rights Jesus were the same person, that splash a pregnant woman with blood Jesus and turn the other cheek Jesus were even the same species of deity.

Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.

During the height of the government enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, some segregated townships filled in their municipal pools rather than let nonwhite kids share in the perverse joy of peeing in the water.

Call every racially profiled, abortion-denied, flag-burning, Fifth Amendment taker and tell them to demand a retrial, because I'm getting high in the highest court in the land.

My father was a slave, and my people died to build this country, and I'm going to stay right here and have a part of it, just like you. And no fascist-minded people like you will drive me from it. Is that clear?

I know that if the peace movement takes its message boldly to the Negro people a powerful force can be secured in pursuit of the greatest goal of all mankind. And the same is true of labor and the great democratic sections of our population.

Blacks were "not yet freed from the bonds of injustice," Kennedy observed. They were "not yet freed from social and economic oppression." Then he added an insight that Black abolitionists, civil rights activists, and organizers had advocated for centuries: "And this Nation, for all its hopes and all its boasts, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free.

During the Second Reconstruction, which, as mentioned earlier, lasted from the Brown decision in 1954 until the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, reconstructionists won important legislative victories in bills declaring formal segregation unconstitutional.

Democracy without respect for individual rights sucks. It's just ganging up against the weird kid, and I'm always the weird kid.

You should know I consider police shootings to be lynchings

There's a very big gulf between the black civil rights leadership in America and the black middle class in America. The black middle class are conservative. Many of those minorities can be persuaded to be members of the Republican Party.

with the Baker Act commitment process, I decided to contact Dr. Morton Birnbaum. Most historians credit him with being the father of the civil rights movement for the mentally

But exacerbating those differences was exactly what Nixon had in mind. Years later, former Nixon aide John Ehrlichman would write that the president took great pleasure "in constructing a political dilemma for the labor union leaders and the civil rights groups.