Civil Rights Quotes by David Duke, Bernie Sanders, Yvette Clarke, Pramila Jayapal, Jeff Sessions, Eric Holder and many others.
In fact, James Meredith who was once the icon of the civil rights movement. He supported me for governor!
I have a long history in fighting for civil rights. I understand that many people in the African-American community may not understand that.
It was August 28th, 1963, and the greatest civil rights coalition in modern history had descended upon Washington. Hundreds of thousands of protesters trekked through the heat, stretching from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.
Civil rights icons, famous journalists, big-time movie producers may all have credits to their name that we can recognize and be grateful for, but their record of good works cannot excuse their harassment of women.
I’ve supported civil rights activity in my state. I have done my job with integrity, equality and fairness for all.
I have loved the Department of Justice ever since, as a young boy, I watched Robert Kennedy prove during the Civil Rights Movement how the department can – and must – always be a force for that which is right.
I think if you are a black person or an Hispanic person, you are not as fond of Rudolph Giuliani as you are if you happen to be a white person. Because he has trampled on people’s civil rights.
All we want is to carry out the greatest expression of a free democracy and vote on Catalonia’s future. This is not about independence: it is about fundamental civil rights and the universal right of self-determination.
….we ain’t doing civil rights here. We just telling stories like they really happen.
The civil rights situation is like a pregnancy. It will get worse, I believe, before it gets better. What the usual pregnancy comes to is a decent baby. That is what we all hope will be the end product of this stress. It is customary, at the end of a pregnancy, to have for your pains a decent baby.
If we don’t believe in free expression for people we despise, we don’t believe in it at all.
As the daughter of a civil rights leader, I believe in the power that compels people to stand up for their freedoms, for justice and opportunity. I know that marching inspires people to take an active role in creating positive change for a better America.
The successes of the LGBT civil rights movement and the more prominent role openly gay people are playing in the public eye has actually turned up the temperature in middle schools and high schools for queer kids.
When people discuss the 1960s and the great Civil Rights Era, they often speak in romantic terms as if there wasn’t immense work put in, and as if there wasn’t immense sacrifice that took place. But none of those battles were easily fought and won; there were sustained movements behind them.
Slowly we have lifeted ourselves by our own bootstraps. Step by halting step, we have beat our way back
I think people instinctively know that their job is to give service and that they are part of a community. It had a great impact on me when my father walked the picket lines and I walked with him during the civil rights movement.
I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.
Would America have been America without her Negro people?
For the gay establishment, the death of right and wrong began when gaining civil rights ceased to be enough.
People always say that I didn’t give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn’t true. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The ’99 percent’ is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.
The mindfulness revolution is not quite as dramatic as the moon shot or the civil rights movement, but I believe, in the long run, it can have just as great an impact.
As a life-long liberal who has engaged in protests against the government and for civil rights, I am saddened at efforts by some of my fellow liberals to silence commencement speakers with whom they might disagree on some issues.
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
Civil rights and women’s rights and gay rights all take time in this country.
I was raised in Arizona, and I went to public school, and the extent of my knowledge of the civil-rights movement was the story of Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King, Jr. I wonder how much my generation knows.
To sin by silence, when they should protest, makes cowards of men.
My book has a pre – civil rights setting with a post – civil rights sensibility. I believe less and less that there is something called “The Black Experience,” though undoubtedly there was one once.
The opinions of men should not be the object of any government. Our civil rights are no more dependent on our religious beliefs than they are dependent upon our thoughts about geometry or physics!
I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
The Christian religion, when divested of the rags in which they [the clergy] have enveloped it, and brought to the original purity and simplicity of it’s benevolent institutor, is a religion of all others most friendly to liberty, science, and the freest expansion of the human mind.
All men are by nature born equally free and independent.
John Lewis’ vital role in the civil rights movement will never be forgotten, and his legacy will forever be acknowledged by our state and our country.
Most blacks have lost the moral authority to claim the mantle of civil rights because they refuse to stand for what is right.
Can anyone seriously contend that whether a 14-year-old boy, who thinks he is a girl, gets to use the girls’ bathroom is a civil rights issue comparable to whether African-Americans get the right to vote?
Among the natural rights of the colonists are these: First a right to life, secondly to liberty, and thirdly to property; together with the right to defend them in the best manner they can.
I think the legacy of the civil rights movement is that now whites are more open to being represented by people of color or people who are women or, again, non-traditional candidates.
Look to a day when people will not be judged by the color of their skin.
My parents were very active in the Civil Rights Movement. My father was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker; my mother was a secretary with the Panthers.
At the end of the day, the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott had to be converted into the 1964 Civil Rights Act. We don’t want politicians who’ve gotta be coaxed, cajoled and protested. We want them on our side from the beginning.
There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites.
That was only the beginning – where one burns books, one will finally also burn people.
If we are to go forward, we must go back and rediscover these precious values – that all reality hinges on moral foundations and that all reality has spiritual control.
We don’t go for segregation. We go for separation. Separation is when you have your own. You control your own economy; you control your own politics; you control your own society; you control your own everything.
The world – and America – has been defined by people who haven’t necessarily abided by the laws and the rules. Civil disobedience is part of our nation’s history and has redirected our country in many instances, from the feminist movement to the Civil Rights movement and beyond.
After marching across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma as a young man, John Lewis went on to become a legendary leader for civil rights alongside other giants of the movement like Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.
The fight for civil rights did not end when Donald Trump was elected president. We’ve got work to do.
Wars are poor chisels for carving out peaceful tomorrows.
Berry Gordy is a music legend, and we all know that, but I don’t think Berry gets enough credit for his involvement with the civil rights movement.
The time is always right to do what is right.
As long as hope remains and meaning is preserved, the possibility of overcoming oppression stays alive.
I am not a civil rights leader, and I don’t profess to be one.
By a declaration of rights, I mean one which shall stipulate freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of commerce against monopolies, trial by juries in all cases, no suspensions of the habeas corpus, no standing armies. These are fetters against doing evil which no honest government should decline.
The Klan had used fear, intimidation and murder to brutally oppress over African-Americans who sought justice and equality and it sought to respond to the young workers of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the same way.
Considering the great importance to the public liberty of the freedom of the press, and the difficulty of submitting it to very precise rules, the laws have thought it less mischievous to give greater scope to its freedom than to the restraint of it.
In this Revolution, no plans have been written for retreat. Those who will not get into step will find that the parade has passed them by.
The things I really cared about – poverty, the Great Society, civil rights – were all being drained away by the Vietnam War. The line that keeps running through my mind is the line I never spoke: “I can’t speak for a war that I believe is immoral.”
From our nation’s founding to the Civil Rights movement, Virginians have always stood up to fight for their most foundational right – a voice in our government.
There was an email forwarded to me from a first-grade teacher, and she said she was teaching them civil rights for MLK weekend, and a little first-grader stood up, and he said, ‘I can explain segregation,’ and proceeded to explain all the scenes from ‘Hidden Figures.’ And I died because that’s everything.
When I was trained as a journalist, as a race-relations reporter in Nashville covering the end of the civil-rights movement, we were strictly forbidden to use the first-person pronoun. There was kind of an electric charge around it. To come out from hiding and use the word ‘I’ carried a lot of fright for me.
The right to vote is one of our nation’s most important civil rights.
We reached a high point in my opinion with the passage of the civil rights legislation and Martin Luther King’s success and the crusade of others. I think we kind of breathed a sigh of relief as if we had achieved the end of racial discrimination or white supremacy.
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.
I was always a politician from the day the civil rights people chose me as their protest singer.
Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.
The Underground Railroad was the first integrated civil rights movement. And it’s a great example of when we work together, what we can go against. Which is 600 miles of crazy terrain being chased by slave catchers to get people to be what they should be in the first case – which is free.
Today’s secular libertarians, who want to remove biblical religion from public life, have trouble making sense of the civil rights movement because it was so clearly a religiously inspired movement that entered the public arena and made a major difference in American life.
Rarely in my 45 years as a civil rights lawyer have I been so angry about an injustice as I am about what happened to Billy Ray Johnson
My great grandmother threw herself in front of a bus. The police tried to say she was committed suicide but the family knew she was just trying to stop civil rights.
No civil rights movement has gotten anywhere without the help of white liberals.
All civil rights and the right to hold office were to be extended to persons of any Christian denomination.
We call on the Senate to reject any judicial nominee who does not affirm fundamental civil rights, including a woman’s right [to obtain an abortion on demand]. The threat an [pro-life] judiciary poses to women’s lives demands nothing less.
Home to some of our nation’s civil rights leaders, Harvard Law is not a bigoted hub of racism but a place where men and women of all races peacefully co-exist in pursuit of higher education.
One of the biggest issues that we face is that we have people who have their own particular concerns, whether it’s on abortion, birth control, divorce and remarriage, civil rights or social justice.
I got interested in politics during the civil rights movement and then Vietnam.
The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history that’s least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.
Our mandate is to be a nation of laws. And the Supreme Court is the place where we look to safeguard our civil rights and our individual liberties.
I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience.
You didn’t see me on television, you didn’t see news stories about me. The kind of role that I tried to play was to pick up pieces or put together pieces out of which I hoped organization might come. My theory is, strong people don’t need strong leaders.
I am the inferior of any man whose rights I trample underfoot.
A lot of the idealism of the Sixties was spot on, from the environmentalism to the war to the Civil Rights movement, the women’s rights movement, you name it.
If we do not save the environment, then whatever we do in civil rights will be of no meaning, because then we will have the equality of extinction.
The unsung heroes of the civil rights movement were always the wives and the mothers.
I’m trying to be a singer, not a civil rights leader.
When I arrived in America, I experienced serious culture shock. For someone with a religious upbringing, the 1960s were an extremely difficult time. Even though religion was a big part of the civil rights and peace movements, in my college religion was treated as irrelevant, hopelessly stodgy, and behind the times.
Like the majority of Atlanta’s residents, I am Black. Our city helped birth the modern civil rights movement, and I am the daughter of a civil rights leader.
In a lot of ways, civil rights division is the conscience of the Justice Department. You can almost measure what kind of Justice Department you have by what kind of civil rights division that you have.
The first thing to learn in intercourse with others is non-interference with their own particular ways of being happy, provided those ways do not assume to interfere by violence with ours.
I thought I might find the real me in Oxford. Civil rights made me accept being a black intellectual. There was no such thing before, but then it was something. So I became one.
Where was the libertarian right during the great struggles for individual liberty in America in the last half-century? The libertarian movement has been conspicuously absent from the campaigns for civil rights for nonwhites, women, gays and lesbians.
A community is democratic only when the humblest and weakest person can enjoy the highest civil, economic, and social rights that the biggest and most powerful possess.
U.S. v. Arizona is a landmark case not just because of the constitutional issues related to who regulates and enforces immigration, but because of its civil rights implications, too.
I don’t like calling myself a “feminist” only because I don’t think I’ve done anything active enough to call myself one. It’d be like calling myself a civil rights activist just because I’m not racist.
A people who extend civil liberties only to preferred groups start down the path either to dictatorship of the right or the left.
There are no ‘white’ or ‘coloured’ signs on the foxholes or graveyards of battle.
In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends.
Lethargy is the forerunner of death to the public liberty.
LGBTQ Americans deserve a president who will always stand with them and protect their civil rights – without hesitation.
If I were an Arab-American, I would insist on being profiled. This is not the time for civil rights. There are larger issues for Americans.
A lot of things happened in a lot of places. And to see how well it was handled in Atlanta. There are a lot of reasons for Atlanta being a special town in the Civil Rights era.
There are severe limitations on civil rights. In the international arena, Iran is turning into an isolated country, and the international community is becoming more hostile toward it.
When I was younger, I had these romantic ideas about the Black Panther Party and what it meant to be a part of the civil rights movement. Then we’re here, and it’s dangerous. And it’s dangerous to say, ‘Black lives matter.’
We must go beyond the arrogance of human rights. We must go beyond the ignorance of civil rights. We must step into the reality of natural rights because all of the natural world has a right to existence and we are only a small part of it. There can be no trade-off.
Here are the values that I stand for: honesty, equality, kindness, compassion, treating people the way you want to be treated and helping those in need. To me, those are traditional values.
The best way to solve any problem is to remove its cause.
I sound like a church nut, but look at the role of the churches in the civil rights movement in the States. People are brought together in other ways that can become drivers of change.
Voting in our country has never been easy, and unfortunately, it has never been guaranteed for everyone. But through the work of brave civil rights leaders, some of whom died for the cause, by the early 2000s we were at a point where most, but still not all, people who wanted to vote could do so.
The NRA is interested in protecting the civil rights of Americans, not protecting the ability of terrorists to get guns.
I think that some of the greatest muckrakers and some of the greatest investigative journalists of all time had strong feelings about civil rights. There is a role for the journalist-advocate. And as long as you play your cards on the table, I think that’s a role that we should allow.
Marriage is sacred and protected and has nothing to do with violating our civil rights.
My work has been in the field of engaged Buddhism. That is my own practice, which began in 1965 that formed the base for the work I was doing in the civil rights and anti-war movement.
My father told me about American democracy. And he said you have to be actively engaged in the political process to make our democracy work. So I’ve been doing that my entire life. Civil rights movement. The peace movement during the Vietnam conflict. The movement to get an apology and redress for Japanese-Americans.
What is needed in the world today is a Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, freeing humanity at last from the oppression of its belief in a violent, angry, and vindictive God.
Freedom of the press, freedom of association, the inviolability of domicile, and all the rest of the rights of man are respected so long as no one tries to use them against the privileged class. On the day they are launched against the privileged they are overthrown.
I’ve done a lot of research about the Civil Rights movement, and I’m fascinated with how difficult it would have been for a black man to show feelings toward a white woman in that time period.
It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s that Congress got serious about the assignment laid out in the post-Civil War amendments.
Without justice, there can be no peace.
They [the founders] proclaimed to all the world the revolutionary doctrine of the divine rights of the common man. That doctrine has ever since been the heart of the American faith.
Young people have this almost romantic attachment to civil rights, liberties, emancipating people from oppression, etc. The idea that such oppression exists in this country offends me, but it’s able to be pushed and sold because education in this country is so woefully incompetent and inept.
If the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s civil rights movement made demands that altered the course of American lives and backed up those demands with the willingness to give up your life in service of your civil rights, with Black Lives Matter, a more internalized change is being asked for: recognition.
People don’t think about the fact that when Barack Obama’s parents had him it was illegal for them to be married in several states in this country. So if we start making it okay that certain people can marry and other people can’t, it’s a slippery slope of civil rights.
I don’t think marriage is a civil right, but I think that being able to transfer property is a civil right.
[Button] If Gay and Lesbian people are given civil rights, soon everyone will want them
The advent of the civil rights movement during the 50s and 60s made it very plain crystal clear to me that we had an obligation to do what we could to make real the Constitution of the United States of America.
Our citizens may be deceived for awhile, and have been deceived; but as long as the presses can be protected, we may trust to them for light.
As a civil rights leader, Mrs. King’s vision of racial peace and nonviolent social change was a fortifying staple in advancing the civil rights movement.
If I’m president, there are going to be government vans that drive around and pick up people who shouldn’t be wearing certain clothing. Talk about lack of civil rights – I’m sorry, I’m pulling you right off the street, and we’re giving you clothes that you’re going to be O.K. in.
We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.
Protests, such as those in favor of labor rights, women’s suffrage, civil rights and gay rights, helped to make America as great as it is.
I believe in civil rights, but not in special privilege laws to allow flaunting homosexuals to become role models for children.
We didn’t have any civil rights. It was just a matter of survival, of existing from one day to the next. I remember going to sleep as a girl hearing the Klan ride at night and hearing a lynching and being afraid the house would burn down.
You probably know the name of Rosa Parks. You probably know that her refusal to move to the colored section in the back of a city bus sparked the Montgomery bus boycotts, one of the pivotal moments in the American civil rights movement.
It is impossible to struggle for civil rights, equal rights for blacks, without including whites. Because equal rights, fair play, justice, are all like the air: we all have it, or none of us has it. That is the truth of it.
I have always had a great deal of respect and admiration for Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a true humanitarian and champion of Women’s Rights and Civil Rights.
The marriage-equality issue should be recognized for what it truly is – a civil rights issue that must be approved to assure that every citizen is treated equally under the law.
I favor the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and it must be enforced at gunpoint if necessary.
Civil rights used to be about treating everyone the same. But today some people are so used to special treatment that equal treatment is considered to be discrimination.
In cultural history, the civil rights movement came before the women’s movement.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
As a Westerner, the child of civil rights and anti-war activists, I embraced Islam not in abandonment of my core values, drawn almost entirely from the progressive tradition, but as an affirmation of them.
One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.
You can’t put civil rights on the ballot.
No sane black man really wants integration! No sane white man really wants integration!
It was clear to me as a civil rights leader in the ’60s that unless we put the social and economic underpinnings beneath the political and the civil rights, we wouldn’t go anywhere.
I’ve always had sort of an interest in American history, full stop, and especially people who contributed to the civil rights struggle.
A black man of my generation born in the late 1960s is more than twice as likely to go to prison in his lifetime then a black man of my father’s generation. I was born after the Voting Rights Act, after the Civil Rights Act, after the Fair Housing Act.
I don’t call myself a white supremacist. I’m a civil rights activist concerned about European-American rights.
From the new hate crimes law to the repeal of DOMA and ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,’ to the emerging popular support for marriage equality, we are making progress at breakneck speed. As someone who has dedicated most of my career to civil rights law, I am deeply moved by this sea change and proud to have done my part.
Well, it’s the last step of the Civil Rights Movement: you know, wrap your hands around some money.
Judge Samuel Alito was born and raised in the great state of New Jersey. Our state has a legacy of producing outstanding jurists, most notably the late William J. Brennan, who ushered in our nation’s recommitment to civil rights in the latter half of the 20th century.
When I taught a civil rights class at the University of Maryland Law School, I would do an exercise with my students. I’d write ‘civil rights’ on the board and ask them to tell me what immediately came to mind.
[If a book were] very innocent, and one which might be confided to the reason of any man; not likely to be much read if let alone, but if persecuted, it will be generally read. Every man in the United States will think it a duty to buy a copy, in vindication of his right to buy and to read what he pleases.
If you follow Donald Trump’s logic, say that he couldn’t decide any civil rights cases because he would be biased.I mean, we do want a diverse and inclusive judiciary – one that looks like the people that they serve. And we do recognize the value of having diverse backgrounds represented.
Soul lyrics, soul music came at about the same time as the civil rights movement, and it’s very possible that one influenced the other.
In reality, civil rights are more important than national rights. They’re the content, the day-to-day: work, life. But people are sensitive to national rights.
When you’re fighting for civil rights, it’s sometimes two steps forward and one step back. Civil rights are an evolution; and you have to bring people along.
The American people hit the streets and did something that the government wouldn’t do: the Civil Rights Act. It didn’t go down well with the corporate world.
The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.
The civil rights movement was not a mirage… It was live and in living color.
My friends in the Congress, I have known Coretta King since I went south during the civil rights movement as a lawyer. She was a vibrant, consistent, totally dedicated partner with her husband.
My father’s leadership was about more than civil rights. He was deeply concerned with human rights and world peace, and he said so on numerous occasions. He was a civil rights leader, true. But he was increasingly focused on human rights and a global concern and peace as an imperative.
There is a strong moralistic strain in the civil rights movement that would remind us that power corrupts, forgetting that the absence of power also corrupts.
Martin Luther King Jr. is remembered as our prince of peace, of civil rights. We owe him something major that will keep his memory alive.
All progress is precarious, and the solution of one problem brings us face to face with another problem.
I am above eighty years old … I suppose I am about the only colored woman that goes about to speak for the rights of the colored women. I want to keep the thing stirring, now that the ice is cracked.
All, too, will bear in mind this sacred principle, that though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will to be rightful must be reasonable; that the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.
Part of the reason I had such a drive to be an activist, and support other activists, is because I was raised Quaker and my parents kept us very much informed and involved as kids in civil rights and the conservation movement.
Truth is on the side of the oppressed today, it’s against the oppressor.
Census data is used to determine more than $675 billion in federal funding; it is a demographic Rosetta Stone that is referenced in the drawing of congressional districts, each states number of Electoral College votes and the application of civil rights laws, including the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act.
We, who are the living, possess the past. Tomorrow is for our martyrs.
Historically, narratives of forgiveness were part of both the anti-slavery movement and the civil rights movement in America. ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ for instance, was based loosely on the life of the Rev. Josiah Henson, who forgave his master that wanted to sell him and beat him after Henson begged him not to.
There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights. Dr. King did not stir us to move for our civil rights to have them taken away in these kinds of fashions.
I`ve never been a passive political supporter. My grandmother, Betty Kleitz , god bless her soul, was from Tuskegee, Alabama, took parts in the civil rights movement and after that became of course like a lot of blacks in the South a staunch Democrat.
Karen Russell learned to think from her father, someone Peter Gammons knows well, Boston Celtics legend Bill Russell, who used his prominence to support Martin Luther King Jr., to support the civil rights movement, and other important work, including work in Africa throughout his career. And Bill Russell is still at it.
Under the president’s spying program, there are no checks and balances. There is no outside review of the legality of this brazen infringement on the civil rights and liberties of the American people. Undeterred by the public outcry, the president [George Bush] vows to continue spying on American citizens.
The issue of civil rights was too much for the establishment to handle. One of the chapters of history thats least studied by historians is the 300 to 500 riots in the U.S. between 1965 and 1970.
I earned my spurs in the civil rights movement. All my life, not for political but for religious reasons, moral reasons, that’s where I’ve been, and I’m proud of it, and I’ll always be there.
After Civil Rights, it was very awkward for whites and blacks. We didn’t know how to talk to each other.
By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.
I would say to Republicans that when you look at civil rights legislation that took place in the 1960s, it took a bipartisan effort to get those things done, and so what I would tell my colleagues, both Republicans and Democrats, is let’s come together, and let’s be for fairness.
All Americans owe a debt of gratitude to Dr. King for his bravery and commitment to civil rights and nonviolence that changed this nation – and world – for the better.
The Civil Rights Commission should never have been brought into existence. It has been most prejudiced in its viewpoint, and has fomented trouble and racial disturbance since its inception. It should be abolished, not extended.
Faith is taking the first step even when you don’t see the whole staircase.
Civil rights activists and union activists shared not just common values and objectives but also common enemies.
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was vigorously and vociferously opposed by the Southern states. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law nonetheless.
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.
Black History Month could focus less on slavery and civil rights and more on the Harlem Renaissance and everything we have achieved. I want to know about the whole black experience.
LISTEN: If you ever wondered what you would do if you were alive in the Civil Rights Movement, NOW IS THE TIME to find out. NOW. RIGHT NOW.
Transgender discrimination is the civil rights issue of our time
Rejecting the fundamental provision of the Civil Rights Act is a rejection of the foundational promise of America that all men and women should be treated equally, a promise for which many Americans have lost their lives.
The art of printing secures us against the retrogradation of reason and information.
A time comes when silence is betrayal.
Sidney Poitier became a star in part by helping black and white Americans negotiate their new relationship in the post-Civil Rights era.
A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.
Time indeed changes manners and notions, and so far we must expect institutions to bend to them. But time produces also corruption of principles, and against this it is the duty of good citizens to be ever on the watch, and if the gangrene is to prevail at last, let the day be kept off as long as possible.
The fights for media justice and racial justice have been intertwined since the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.
The vote is the most powerful instrument ever devised by man for breaking down injustice and destroying the terrible walls which imprison men because they are different from other men.
The Civil Rights Movement also reaffirmed me as a singer. It taught me that singing was not entertainment, it was something else.
There was no miracle that night.
I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, ‘Hey man, we don’t go for that anymore.’
We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.
I think part of what we’re seeing in the rise of white nationalism is their response to Black Lives Matter, is their response to an ever-increasing fight for equal rights, for civil rights, and for human rights.
The argument of those who are being criticized at any time, the civil rights movement forward, the anti-war movement forward, is, it’s always outside agitators doing it.
It’s time for us as a country to try to come together in ways that freedom was really meant to be.
Most of the major ills of the world have been caused by well-meaning people who ignored the principle of individual freedom, except as applied to themselves, and who were obsessed with fanatical zeal to improve the lot of mankind.
I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.
I had thought about becoming a civil rights lawyer, but I gave it up.
We do need to think about how we have security – everyone has a right to that – but we also need to think about how we maintain civil rights and personal freedom.
The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically. Intelligence plus character – that is the goal of true education.
We grew up as kids watching those movies and we were exposed to themes of civil rights, unfairness, bigotry and fathers struggling against the kind of mob of the town, so you remember how you felt as a kid being taken seriously, that you are part of the human drama.
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.
In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights.
The legislative powers of government reach actions only and not opinions.
I do not want to deny anyone their livelihood or civil rights. Who wants to discriminate against anybody… But when it comes to homosexuality, I believe the laws of our land should be in line with God’s laws.
The notion of women being written out of history is as old as the Bible, but it always seems more galling when it is the history of progressive movements – such as the abolitionist campaign in Britain or the fight for African-American civil rights – in which the role of women has been diminished.
The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority.
Children’s liberation is the next item on our civil rights shopping list.
Many Americans who supported the initial thrust of civil rights, as represented by the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, later felt betrayed as the original concept of equal individual opportunity evolved toward the concept of equal group results.
Rosa Parks was a woman of strength, conviction, and morality. Her action on December 1, 1955, to defy the law made her a leading figure in our nation’s civil rights history.
I became a part of the Civil Rights movement early on and that has really shaped a great deal of my thinking.
Covering the civil-rights movement was a mind- and eye-opener for me. Houston was a segregated society, as was Texas as a whole – some of it by law, a lot of it by fear and tradition. But there was no violence where I lived, and if there was hate, it was either concealed from me or I just didn’t recognize it.
I am an American; free born and free bred, where I acknowledge no man as my superior, except for his own worth, or as my inferior, except for his own demerit.
The liberty of speaking and writing guards our other liberties.
When people are breaking the law, they don’t get an invitation to the White House. They ought to be getting an invitation to the big house… This is just an anathema to everything that the civil rights movement was truly all about and what it accomplished.
To be one, to be united is a great thing. But to respect the right to be different is maybe even greater.
The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything.
Missing from the national conversation are voices of pro-immigration reformers and civil rights leaders, who can speak on behalf of those who have no voice.
Rosa Parks was primed, she had the Civil Rights Movement behind her, she didn’t just decide to sit on the bus, it was strategic.
In 2017, Trump pardoned Joe Arpaio, an Arizona sheriff who was ordered by a federal court to stop racially profiling and was convicted of criminal contempt when he refused. Arpaio, by targeting Latinx people, was violating both the U.S. Constitution and our civil rights.
Ever since the civil rights movement, the black church has always encouraged people to utilize their voting right, which is a right that was fought for.
Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker, in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle.
There is no contradiction between effective law enforcement and respect for civil and human rights.
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!
It’s appalling that there have to be movements organized to give human beings the right to be human beings in the eyes of other human beings.
Civil rights are more important today than they ever have been in our country. There is so much divisiveness today.
In my lifetime, we have lost a President, a Civil Rights leader and a Presidential candidate – all to gun violence.
the minority possess their equal rights, which equal law must protect, and to violate would be oppression.
Planned Parenthood has been far more lethal to black lives than the KKK ever was. And the Democrat Party and the black civil rights allies are partners in this genocide.
The power granted the Attorney General to intervene in all equal-protection-of-the-law cases is extremely broad and dangerous. Choices made by the Attorney General could follow a political and selected pattern.
I was lucky I had a mom who had seen it all. From seeing my grandfather march in the Civil Rights era, she understood the depth, character, and stability you need to go through racism. She taught me not to accept it to but deal with it and be better than it.
Vice President Mondale devoted himself to championing the civil rights of all Americans and worked to ensure that everyone has opportunity to achieve success in their lives regardless of their socioeconomic background or upbringing. We are deeply grateful for his service to the United States and the legacy he leaves.
Had it not been for the ministry of my good friend Dr. Billy Graham, my work in the civil rights movement would not have been as successful as it has been.
Too often, advances in civil rights or women’s rights are undermined by wrong-headed legislation or weak-kneed political leadership.
My image had always been very heterosexual, very straight. So it was a nice experience for me, a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian civil rights.
… being a feminist means that you believe in civil rights and social justice.
Those who are not looking for happiness are the most likely to find it, because those who are searching forget that the surest way to be happy is to seek happiness for others.
I must personally say that I do question the sincerity and nonviolent intentions of some civil rights leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Mr. James Farmer, and others, who are known to have left wing associations.
It’s not easy to be a martyr in the field of race relations.
When I went to law school, nobody heard of civil rights.
Where the press is free and every man able to read, all is safe.
My grandfather James Peck was a civil rights activist.
Food is an important lens onto the civil rights movement. One of the central issues of the movement was the right to eat in places that served the public. This battle led to the lunch counter sit-ins, which became embattled, contested places.
On human rights, civil rights and environmental quality, I consider myself to be very liberal. On the management of government, on openness of government, on strengthening individual liberties and local levels of government, I consider myself a conservative. And I don’t see that the two attitudes are incompatible.
Even here in America, people are fighting for civil rights 45 years after the civil rights movement.
The failures of the past must not be an excuse for the inaction of the present and the future.
I want some help on this. I’m being very honest, i want some ideas, as somebody who was arrested 50 years ago fighting for Civil Rights trying to desegregate schools in Chicago, who spent his whole life fighting against racism, I want your ideas. What do you think we can do? What can we do?
Liberty, whether natural, civil, or political, is the lawful power in the individual to exercise his corresponding rights. It is greatly favored in law.
Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.
I believe in civil rights. Every man is born equal and should be treated as human.
None of us would trade freedom of expression for the narrowness of the public censor. America is a free market for people who have something to say, and need not fear to say it.
A lot of things happened in a lot of places. And to see how well it was handled in Atlanta. There are a lot of reasons for Atlanta being a special town in the Civil Rights era.
I never remember, like, saying, ‘Well, I’m going to belong – join the civil rights movement.’
1963, because of the sense of moral authority that the civil rights movement had, we were able to get people to respond, because of the quality of our demand and our sense of moral authority.
The greatest right of a civilized person is to be left alone, unless he does harm to others or is threatening to do harm to himself.
The very rights that we supposedly won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist for those labeled felons. That’s why I say we have not ended racial caste in America; we’ve merely redesigned it.
Few whites are ready to actively promote civil rights for blacks.
In Iroquois society, leaders are encouraged to remember seven generations in the past and consider seven generations in the future when making decisions that affect the people.
Having gone through the civil rights struggle, having gone through the anti-Vietnam War struggle, by the time I was in my 20s, I had something that the current generation doesnt have. And that is a sense of efficacy.
The South actually has a very strong tradition of activism. The civil rights movement came from down here! It was black activists demanding that their voices be heard. People say these are red states. No they’re not!
The Cause of civil liberty must not be surrendered at the end of one, or even one hundred defeats.
People are very comfortable when race relations get looked at retrospectively. Slavery, the civil rights movement, etc.
I think everybody should get married. Boys and girls. Girls and boys. Boys and boys! Girls and girls! Shouldn’t we all be entitled to a family-Civil rights baby it’s civil rights. It doesn’t get any better here in Berkeley I’ll tell you that.
I think, especially among the New York intelligentsia at that time, that there was a reason Bob Dylan went to New York to happen, because there was a culture developed there around the ideas of civil rights, around the idea of democracy growing out of Emerson and Thoreau, these ideas of the fanfare for the common man.
Don’t interfere with anything in the Constitution. That must be maintained, for it is the only safeguard of our liberties.
Historically, the court has been the forum to which individuals can turn when they believed their constitutional rights were violated. This has been especially noteworthy in the arena of civil rights.
When and under what conditions is the black man to have a free ballot? When is he in fact to have those full civil rights which have so long been his in law?
The leadership for civil rights has to take place in the White House or it is going to take place in the streets.
You cannot understand the politics of today without understanding the Civil Rights Movement and the role it played in our society.
We wanted black power to be all things to all people.
JACL has always been at the very forefront of making sure citizens’ civil rights remain intact. They fight wholeheartedly against discrimination, prejudice and racial bias and they always provide a calm voice during turbulent times.
African-Americans have always viewed the protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat comes from police officers or street criminals. Far from ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks, African-American officials and their constituents have been consumed by it.
When I hear someone’s in the civil rights business, I oil up my AR-25.
The ADA was a landmark civil rights legislation. It was a bill of rights for persons with disabilities, a formal acknowledgement that Americans with disabilities are Americans first and that they’re entitled to the same rights and freedoms as everybody else.
The civil rights movement is understanding your freedom under the Constitution of these United States and if anyone tries to take those freedoms from you, you better rise up and fight and that’s what we’re doing together.
Two soldiers and a villain are enough to blow up the rights of the citizens.
Race to race, the Republicans are putting up candidates that are quite far out of the mainstream in terms of should we have passed the Civil Rights Act or does Social Security need to exist.
The right of every American to first-class citizenship is the most important issue of our time.
If Martin Luther King came back, he’d say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.
Dr. King’s famous ‘I Have a Dream’ speech was delivered at ‘The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom,’ a call to justice beyond the traditional civil rights movement’s focus.
[Rosa Louise] Parks used to say, “Everybody looks at me because I sat down once in Montgomery, but the real hero is a woman named Septima Clark.”She created the Citizenship Schools [where civil-rights activists taught basic literacy and political education classes].
[M]y mother fought hard for civil rights so that instead of a mop, I could hold this microphone. And while she may be proud of me tonight, I’ve got to tell you, Mom, I’m even more proud of you. Thank you, Mom.
I grew up in the early ’60s, and there was a lot of civil rights, a lot of unrest in our country.
Sometimes, I am also identified as a civil rights leader or a human rights activist. I would also like to be thought of as a complex, three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood human being with a rich storehouse of experiences, much like everyone else, yet unique in my own way, much like everyone else.
In our country there’s never been a successful progressive struggle that did not have a soundtrack, whether it was the civil rights movement, workers’ rights movement, women’s rights movement. There’s got to be songs at the barricades, and those are the kinds of songs that I try to write.
By the early 1960s, there was a moral consensus on what needed to be done on civil rights.
I came at age in the ’60s, and initially my hopes and dreams were invested in politics and the movements of the time – the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement. I worked on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign for president as a teenager in California and the night he was killed.
President Obama is a man who had certain advantages because of the civil rights movement. He had the opportunity to go to some of the best schools in this country – schools that train you how to run the political paradigm, not challenge it. The leaders of the Black Power Movement were challenging that paradigm.
We’re talking about in the Proposition 8 case fundamental rights, civil rights. I offer no apology for the position I took in Prop. 8.
A right to property is founded in our natural wants, in the means with which we are endowed to satisfy these wants, and the right to what we acquire by those means without violating the similar rights of other sensible beings.
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.
So much has to do with going beyond treating black people as cosmetic and symbolic items, as opposed to genuine personalities and human beings. And that is a deep moral and spiritual issue, which can of course be backed up by Civil Rights Commissions which enforce the laws against any form of discrimination.
It was the Democrats who were against civil rights legislation
I admired Truman, among many other things, because he integrated the Army. I admired JFK because the very first civil rights legislation was passed at his insistence. JFK showed what you could do, though he was a deeply flawed person, as we all now know.
It is only with the rise of the Civil Rights Movement that you begin to see different examinations of not only Reconstruction but slavery itself, and there is a lesson to be drawn here about how the times influence the writing of history, something that we should never forget.
Growing up in Mississippi – a state that historically was a place of racial injustice, inequality and oppression – gave me the unique opportunity to experience first-hand the evolution of the civil rights movement through the eyes of my parents, grandparents, and the black elders of our community.
Of course, I have a different vested interest in the gay community, because I am gay, and I would certainly enjoy the tax advantages that straight people have, and the inheritance advantages, and things like Social Security, but I’ve always been a civil rights advocate across the board. That’s how I was raised.
The resignation of Attorney General Eric Holder is met with both pride and disappointment by the Civil Rights community. We are proud that he has been the best Attorney General on Civil Rights in U.S. history and disappointed because he leaves at a critical time when we need his continued diligence most.
Forgiveness became a big part of the civil rights movement, juxtaposed against the violence of protesters and law enforcement. King described forgiveness in one of his early sermons as a pardon, a process of life, and the Christian weapon of social redemption.
This is Not Another Revolution. This is a Civil Rights Movement
Back in the 1970s, Kodak tried to give $25m to a black civil rights organisation in Rochester, New York. The company’s shareholders rose up in arms: making this politically charged offering wasn’t the reason they had entrusted Kodak with their money. The donation was withdrawn.
We’ve made so many advances in other areas – civil rights, gay rights – but ageism is still an area that’s taboo and not talked about and dealt with.
In Tanganyika we believe that only evil, Godless men would
make the color of a mans skin the criteria for granting him civil
rights.
make the color of a mans skin the criteria for granting him civil
rights.
We chose to frame “March” around the inauguration of Barack Obama because it was such an important moment in the story of the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t the fulfillment of Dr. [Martin Luther] King’s dream, but it was a major down payment.
Being able to laugh got me through.
There is an innocence or purity that we see in renewals and in the Mennonite church and a new an invigorated civil rights movement.
Well, there’s 10 – there’s 10 different – there’s 10 different titles, you know, to the Civil Rights Act, and nine out of 10 deal with public institutions. And I’m absolutely in favor of one deals with private institutions, and had I been around, I would have tried to modify that.
Jim Crow laws stripped blacks of basic rights. Despite landmark civil rights laws, many public schools were still segregated, blacks still faced barriers to voting, and violence by white racists continued. Such open racism is mostly gone in America, but covert racism is alive and well.
Apple is to the United States government what Clarence Thomas was to the civil rights coalition. How dare you get this big sidestepping us.
Thought that is silenced is always rebellious. Majorities, of course, are often mistaken. This is why the silencing of minorities is necessarily dangerous. Criticism and dissent are the indispensable antidote to major delusions.
Civil Rights: What black folks are given in the U.S. on the installment plan, as in civil-rights bills. Not to be confused with human rights, which are the dignity, stature, humanity, respect, and freedom belonging to all people by right of their birth.
Confirming John Roberts would endanger much of the progress made by the nation in civil rights over the past half century.
During the 60’s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.
There’s a great book about John Kennedy and his relationship to civil rights called ‘The Bystander.’ The title alone suggests that he did as little as possible, any minimal critical effort, to really facilitate civil rights in the White House.
The oppressed should rebel, and they will continue to rebel and raise disturbance until their civil rights are fully restored to them and all partial distinctions, exlusions, and incapacitations are removed.
Obviously, In The Heat Of The Night was a landmark movie because the timing was perfect. It was in the middle of the Civil Rights Movement.
The Democratic Party is always going to be the party of civil rights and fairness – everybody gets an equal, fair shot at the American dream. And we’re going to be the party that really fights to protect planet Earth – enjoy whatever time we’re going to get!
In the 1950s, the black men and women and their white allies who fought for civil rights and basic human dignity could look to the federal government. If the racist sheriff and his troops beat them with batons or sprayed them and their children with water cannons, the attorney general would act.
Prior to civil rights, the Democratic Party had been defined by an increasingly untenable alliance of ideological opposites – integrationist Northern liberals like Hubert Humphrey and Herbert Lehman teamed with Southern segregationists like Richard Russell and John Stennis.
Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.
You got to understand, Arthur Alexander was there with us, and some of his crew. It was in the ’50s in Alabama. It was before even the civil rights stuff even started. You can imagine the hatred, although we didn’t have it as bad as other parts of the country, I must say.
They don’t have special rights because we have civil rights laws that protect them. The laws work both ways.
I’m a civil rights attorney. I’m a victim rights attorney.
In any event, any person from 2.0 down on the Tone Scale should not have, in any thinking society, any civil rights of any kind, because by abusing those rights he brings into being arduous and strenuous laws which are oppressive to those who need no such restraints.
Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.
The most significant civil rights problem is voting. Each citizen’s right to vote is fundamental to all the other rights of citizenship and the Civil Rights Acts of 1957 and 1960 make it the responsibility of the Department of Justice to protect that right.
I speak not for myself, but so those without a voice can be heard. Those who have fought for their rights. Their right to live in peace. Their right to be treated with dignity. Their right to equality of opportunity. Their right to be educated.
If you look at the history of other movements, whether Civil Rights or environmental rights, these are all decades-long undertakings.
Remember, we are not fighting for the freedom of the Negro alone, but for the freedom of the human spirit a larger freedom that encompasses all mankind.
The Patriot Act is certainly a concern; all of those things are dangerous. I think more important than me preaching is that we as a nation have to have the debate. I don’t know what the answers are. I just know that if the idea is to say talking about it makes you unpatriotic, I’ve got to call your bluff on that.
Hate is too great a burden to bear.
How could they say that my religion, Islam was a ‘race hate’ religion after all the plunder and enslavement and domination of my people by white Christians in the name of white supremacy?
I’ve heard people in the Middle East tell me that the most inspiring thing for them as people struggling against dictatorship in the Middle East is the memory of the civil rights movement.
Through the dark days of legalized segregation and on into the civil rights era, jazz shone as a beacon for achieving interracial respect and understanding. It seemed as if the dream of a color-blind society was within reach in the jazz world, where musicians were judged on merit and not skin color.
Obama’s endorsement of gay marriage is hardly as consequential as Johnson’s legislative success on civil rights.
I think that for many of us, the years of the Civil Rights movements – Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy running for president in 1968 to end the war and so forth – these were defining moment in terms of trying to hold government accountable and have a level of responsibility and truth-telling.
I was raised with no religious training or influence. Except the influence was to be a moral and ethical person at the secular level. And to be a peace marcher, an activist for civil rights, peace and justice.
The government has a history of not treating people fairly, from the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II to African-Americans in the Civil Rights era.
One individual can begin a movement that turns the tide of history. Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement, Mohandas Ganhi in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa are examples of people standing up with courage and non-violence to bring about needed changes.
On July 2, 1964, President Johnson signed into law the Civil Rights Act. Its enactment, following the longest continuous debate in the history of the U.S. Senate, enshrined into law the basic principle upon which our country was founded – that all people are created equal.
I believe God was in Christ, not will be, perhaps, maybe if we’re good boys and girls, it’s over, it’s done, we are one people, race is a violation, nations are a violation.
One of the most important parts of the civil rights movement that people don’t talk about was these mass meetings. It’s like “Movement Church.” It’s a combination of the music of the movement and the church. Those mass meetings are where people got the energy to go on to the next day.
If only women are talking about women’s rights, then the issue has failed from the start. If you think about the Holocaust, that wasn’t just a Jewish issue. Civil rights weren’t just a black issue.
I am having nothing to do with this so-called civil rights bill. The liberal left-wingers have passed it. Now let them employ some pinknik social engineers in Washington, D.C., to figure out what to do with it.
All of the civil rights problems during the past years have created a situation where America right now is moving toward a police state. You can’t have anything otherwise. So that’s your supposition.
As you grow up, always tell the truth, do no harm to others, and don’t think you are the most important being on earth. Rich or poor, you then can look anyone in the eye and say, ‘I’m probably no better than you, but I’m certainly your equal.
Culture is about humanizing people. You look at the African-American civil rights movement, you look at the LGBT rights movement – the culture changed before the politics did.
It is my hope that the pagan media and academic establishment will implode on the force of its own corruption and stagnation.
The rise of African nations concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement gave black America a burst of pride over and above anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.
On March 7, 1965, some 600 civil rights activists marched in Selma, Alabama, demanding an end to racial discrimination. The demonstration was led by now-Rep. John Lewis and Hosea Williams, who worked with my father, Martin Luther King Jr.
Neither Pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion. -quoting John Locke’s argument.
We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.
The essence of Ferguson is the spirit of the people, and I’m so happy to see the spirit because I haven’t seen it like that since the Civil Rights Movement.
I know, up on top you are seeing great sights, but down here at the bottom we, too, should have rights.
We are fighting for the right to live as free humans in this society. In fact, we are actually fighting for rights that are even greater than civil rights and that is human rights.
We must protect the civil rights of American citizens – African-Americans, Hispanic Americans, and all Americans – by ensuring that their jobs, wages, and well-being come first.
I think that the thing that we learned back in the day of the Civil Rights Movement is that you do have to keep on keeping on.
In the women’s movement, women needed men to stand up and say, ‘This isn’t right.’ In the civil rights of the ’60s, it took people of all color to demand equal rights.
We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
The press is impotent when it abandons itself to falsehood.
Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He’s helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.
Civil marriage, like all civil rights provided by the government, must be provided equally to all Americans.
For my grandfather, there was no distinction. There was no tension between his support for civil rights for black people and his animus toward gay people because both of those positions were scripturally derived.
There’s no problem on the planet that can’t be solved without violence. That’s the lesson of the civil rights movement.
I care about affordable housing. I care about bus routes. I care about small business. I care about schools. These are not Muslim issues. Even protection of civil rights – that’s not just a Muslim issue. That is for everyone.
Everybody can be great…because anybody can serve. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.
Though the will of the majority is in all cases to prevail, that will, to be rightful, must be reasonable.
As a civil rights activist of the past 40 years, I cannot support a show that disrespects those beliefs and practices.
Rosa Parks’ entire career has been one as working as a civil rights activist.
Now liberals compare their every riot, every traffic blockage, every Starbucks-window-smashing street protest to the civil rights movement — which was only necessary because of them.
I love how music and chants were used in the Civil Rights movement to help people keep marching. How songs were both a balm and a call to action.
Though the Attorney General of the United States carries many responsibilities and undertakes many tasks, there can be none more important than the pursuit of civil rights on behalf of all the people of this country.
Yes, I think it’s really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.
My heart beats red, white, and blue.
And with patriotism it aches
Generally, I believe in democracy, freedom and civil rights
But in particular, cupcakes
And with patriotism it aches
Generally, I believe in democracy, freedom and civil rights
But in particular, cupcakes
The tragedy of the civil rights movement is that just as it achieved the beginning of the end of racial segregation, white educated elites became swept up in the glamour of the sexual revolution.
Even in the civil rights movement, there were so many unbelievable women. They never, ever received the credit that they should have received. They did all of the, and I cannot say it, they did all of the dirty work. Hard work.
We need a modern people’s lobby that empowers all of us to choose our leaders and set our agenda. Imagine voting for a president we’re truly excited about. Imagine a government that promotes capitalism and civil rights.
The constitution does not provide for first and second class citizens.
To be able to think freely, a man must be certain that no consequence will follow whatever he writes.
Civil rights for all Americans, black, white, red, yellow, the rich, poor, young, old, gay, straight, et cetera, is not a liberal or a conservative value. It’s an American value that I would think that we pretty much all agree on.
The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.
The human rights community has focused very narrowly on political and civil rights for many decades, and with reason, but now we have to ask how can we broaden the view.
Civil Rights opened the windows. When you open the windows, it does not mean that everybody will get through. We must create our own opportunities.
Let me go over this again on the reclaiming the civil rights movement. People of faith that believe that you have an equal right to justice – that is the essence. And if it’s not the essence, then we’ve been sold a pack of lies. The essence is everyone deserves a shot – the content of character, not the color of skin.
Im a child of the Civil Rights Movement.
In the 1960s, the civil rights movement was about getting to know your culture, your history. I know all about my history.
Under the privilege of the First Amendment many, many ridiculous things are said.
There’s a long bipartisan tradition of civil rights enforcement.
I am for freedom of religion, and against all maneuvers to bring about a legal ascendency of one sect over another.
In the Catholic view of things, abortion is a justice issue, not an issue of sexual morality… it is a civil rights issue, arguably the greatest civil rights issue of our time.
Since the ousting and capture of Saddam Hussein by U.S. forces, civil rights and personal freedoms have been restored in Iraq, as well as equal rights to all, not just to Saddams entourage of terrorists.
I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.
Obama’s not down for the civil rights struggle, and he certainly wasn’t down for the apartheid struggle, but he’s clearly gonna take advantage of it and insert himself in such a way as to make it look like he is single-handedly responsible for apartheid going by the wayside.
In fifth grade, we did 10 minutes on slavery and 40 minutes on Abraham Lincoln, and in 10th grade you might do 10 minutes on the civil rights era and 40 minutes on Martin Luther King, and that’s it.
It was a privilege to serve as the assistant attorney general for civil rights, a role that allowed me to enforce the Civil Rights Act and help make its promise a reality.
The church is the only mechanism for mass mobilization. That’s why the civil rights movement came out of the church.
You are losing because blacks are getting their civil rights in the cities.
The liberal psyche wants to protect minorities, to apologize for imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and the appalling treatment of black people during the civil rights movement. At the same time, they want to continue to defend the rights of individuals.
If we [gays] want to be equal under the law, we must now – as the great heroes of the Civil Rights movement of 1963 and 1964 showed us – turn our attention to the federal government.
Rosa Parks will be remembered for her lasting contributions to society. Her legacy lives on in the continued struggle for civil rights around the world. She will be missed.
There is a debt of service due from every man to his country, proportioned to the bounties which nature and fortune have measured to him.
I think the Civil Rights Movement changed that trajectory for me. The first thing I did was leave school. I was suspended for my participation in Movement demonstrations in my hometown, December, 1961
Look at what I’ve done my entire life. I have been working on behalf of civil rights, women’s rights, human rights for years and I know how challenging it is to change our political system and I have the highest regard for those who have put themselves on the line.
Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.
The only way to make sure people you agree with can speak is to support the rights of people you don’t agree with.
Civil rights laws were not passed to protect the rights of white men and do not apply to them.
The days of the heavyweight champion as civil rights leader are long gone. You think you’d see Ali rolling around on the floor of an ESPN Zone? I don’t think so.
For me, jazz will always be the soundtrack of the civil rights movement.
The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.
Finally and long overdue, your people, oppressed and disgraced by hatred and maliciousness, have achieved justice: now you enjoy full citizen’s rights, but you’ll remain Jews nonetheless.
If it’s necessary to form a Black Nationalist army, we’ll form a Black Nationalist army. It’ll be ballot or the bullet. It’ll be liberty or it’ll be death.
I never thought I’d see the day that I would see white folks as frightened, or more so, than black folks was during the civil rights movement when we was in Mississippi.
I think every high school student who was alert during the early ’60s got very embittered by the slow progress and the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement.
It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.
I’ve never been afraid to step out and to reach out and to move out in order to make things happen.
If I was an exceptional human being in Detroit, then I saw no reason why I couldn’t be an exceptional human being in Mississippi. In Hattiesburg.
I think that the most effective social protest that any artist can do would be things that come naturally and feel obvious. I think the Resist movement will continue among people who believe in science, who believe in rights for women, who believe in civil rights.
To deny people their human rights is to challenge their very humanity.
Michael Jackson is an accidental civil rights leader – an accidental pioneer. He broke ground and barriers in so many different realms in artistry, in pictures, in movies, in music, you name it.
The civil rights movement was devoid of grace; it was using some unfortunate people as means to a communistic end.
We have a fabulous civil rights history here in Birmingham.
I have very mixed feelings about Jesse Jackson. He’s very good about labor, and human and civil rights issues, but not so good on cultural issues.
Liberalism isn’t quite as liberal as it pretends to be. And it goes through my adventures with the FBI during the anti-war period and the civil rights period.
Gay marriage will be universally accepted in time. But if I may be so bold as to say to gays and lesbians, don’t wait for that time to arrive. Just as my father and his generation did not ‘wait’ for their civil rights, nor should you. The toothpaste ain’t going back in the tube. The tide has turned.
Power may be at the end of a gun, but sometimes it’s also at the end of the shadow or the image of a gun.
A Bill of Rights is what the people are entitled to against every government, and what no just government should refuse, or rest on inference.
My life is about being a civil rights activist. That’s my life. Whoever you are, everyone, we either have civil rights or we don’t. It’s for everyone.
I think art can really serve to inspire a movement – and, of course, it has in the past. The Civil Rights movement wouldn’t have the same resonance without the songs from everyone from Pete Seeger to Odetta to James Brown.
When President Kennedy was elected, many black Americans, like so many Americans, were captivated by his youth and energy and promise and were especially hopeful that he might move the country in a new direction on civil rights.
It is time enough, for the rightful purposes of civil government, for its officers to interfere [in the propagation of religious teachings] when principles break out into overt acts against peace and good order.
The demands of the Civil Rights era weren’t limited to voting rights – they strove for an end to segregation in all aspects of life, including housing, employment, and public accommodations.
It was a particularly interesting and exciting time, and the European political and artistic establishment was turned on by the Civil Rights Movement and the artistic revolution that was becoming a part of jazz.
You go through the Civil Rights struggle, everybody knew the songs – ‘We shall overcome.’ Everybody would sing it. Music helped us. James Brown, ‘Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud.’ They helped black people figure out how to navigate what was a very treacherous place in America for them.
If we buy into the notion that somehow property rights are less important, or are in conflict with, human or civil rights, we give the socialists a freer hand to attack our property.
The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith. We saw ourselves doing the work of the Almighty. Segregation and racial discrimination were not in keeping with our faith, so we had to do something.
It is difficult to overstate the importance of the Civil Rights Act.
The Habeas Corpus secures every man here, alien or citizen, against everything which is not law, whatever shape it may assume.
It was we, the people; not we, the white male citizens; nor yet we, the male citizens; but we, the whole people, who formed the Union…. Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less
We want to make certain that every American who stood in silent tribute to Rosa Parks hopes that the Sepreme Court Judge will break silence and speak out clearly for the civil rights that define our unity as a nation.
As president, I won’t just continue to defend women’s civil rights from political attacks – I’ll make guaranteeing those rights a priority.
The next step has to be the necessary step. It’s always to put the immigrant community and the civil rights movement ahead of partisan politics.
Felons are typically stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement, including the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. They’re relegated to a permanent undercaste.
If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.
Any violation of civil rights will be aggressively pursued and prosecuted by my administration. No one will be above the law.
Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry.
The man who loves his country on its own account, and not merely for its trappings of interest or power, can never be divorced for it, can never refuse to come forward when he finds that she is engaged in dangers which he has the means of warding off.
Mary O’Neal used to say that I was teaching her course in disguise, as she said “in cultural disguise.” What she meant was that this really was a very fervent kind of civil rights art course, not altogether art history. It wasn’t altogether theory. She called it an action course.
We cannot have policies that punish people for taking action. Imagine the further harm it would have caused if the federal government banned civil rights leaders from boycotting buses in Montgomery, Alabama, or banning divestment from Apartheid South Africa.
When I went off to college, I went believing I was a Republican. And actually I was president of Young Republicans for a couple of months and then I decided that I was much more in the camp of people like, you know, President Johnson – trying to promote civil rights, voting rights, ending poverty.
The civil rights movement didn’t begin in Montgomery and it didn’t end in the 1960s. It continues on to this very minute.
Tolerance is the positive and cordial effort to understand another’s beliefs, practices, and habits without necessarily sharing or accepting them.
There’s a pattern of the pathway opening in a certain way. We stared thinking, there’s so many wonderful films about civil rights movements, but there isn’t even one yet about the women’s movement? It’s hard to capture because it’s so sprawling, and it’s an ideology.
Mrs. Parks was a shy, soft spoken woman who was uncomfortable being revered as a symbol of the civil rights movement. She only hoped to inspire young people to achieve great things.
We may have all come on different ships, but we’re in the same boat now.
Selfish men were…trying to make capital for themselves out of the sacred cause of civil rights
My mother saw nothing inconsistent in her traditional desire to look after her husband and children and her radical politics. She began her civil rights work before most people had ever heard the word ‘feminism,’ and in those early years, she was focused on racial justice.
You can’t rise as a class. You have to rise individually. It’s what many of the civil rights-era people don’t understand.
We are out to defeat injustice and not white persons who may be unjust.
How do we preserve our civil rights, our traditions as a liberal democracy, in a time when government power is expanding and is more and more difficult to check?
I’ve always stood for my people, with my people, but some guys just don’t have voices like that. I don’t like the pressure some people put on others. Some people are just not built for it. Some guys just play basketball, they don’t talk, they don’t post. Everybody in the ’60s wasn’t in the civil rights movement.
Our wish is that…[there be] maintained that state of property, equal or unequal, which results to every man from his own industry or that of his fathers.
This bill, by vesting the power to withhold or terminate Federal funds, creates a concentration of power of economic coercion unequaled in the history of governments-a power concentration which defies the experience of mankind with the temptation of power to corrupt.
Jail threats did not dissuade Martin Luther King – and intergenerational justice is a moral issue of comparable magnitude to civil rights.
The black power movement was not a separation from the civil rights movement, but a continuation of this whole process of democratization.
The tyranny of the many would be when one body takes over the rights of others, and then exercises its power to change the laws in its favor.
Sexual preference has nothing to do with civil rights.
Stop and frisk – whether done while walking down the street or while driving a car – is a civil rights violation.
We start ‘The Butler’ in June and that’s incredibly exciting for me because I get to work with the amazing Forest Whitaker again. It’s a phenomenal script and a great, great role – I play his son. Oprah Winfrey is his wife and my mother. My character is a radical civil rights activist.
I think the Civil Rights Movement changed that trajectory for me. The first thing I did was leave school. I was suspended for my participation in Movement demonstrations in my hometown, December, 1961.
The 21st century for the black community is about building human capital. That is the undone business. That is the unmet need. That is the completion of the civil rights mission.
Eventually [black men] are arrested, whether they’ve committed any serious crime or not, and branded criminals or felons for life. Upon release, they’re ushered into a parallel social universe in which the civil and human rights supposedly won during the Civil Rights Movement no longer apply to them.
We came equals into this world, and equals shall we go out of it.
Well, my personal mission statement is that we want marriage equality in all 50 states. We want it not to be a state-by-state issue. We don’t want it to be something the majority is voting on. I don’t think the civil rights of any minority should be in the hands of any majority.
Eyes is the attempt to tell the story of the Civil Rights movement and to create an emotional, intellectual constituency. But what do you do after that? The black community doesn’t have institutions that pick up such moments and preserve them.
What are you doing for others?
I went to a very progressive elementary school where I was heavily educated in civil rights. I remember learning about Harvey Milk when I was in sixth or seventh grade and being so inspired.
While on the level of civil rights many things have changed decisively for the better, on the level of attitudes and mentality there’s still a long way to go. On the other hand it’s obvious that it’s much easier to change a law than to change a way of thinking.
Most students graduate from high school knowing nine words about the civil rights movement: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and “I Have a Dream.” And that’s it!
Always remember Rahm Emanuel and those of his ilk who are opposed to our fundamental civil right to keep and bear arms when you donate to NRA-ILA or the NRA Civil Rights Legal Defense Fund.
Never, never be afraid to do what’s right, especially if the well-being of a person or animal is at stake. Society’s punishments are small compared to the wounds we inflict on our soul when we look the other way.
Every society, all government, and every kind of civil compact therefore, is or ought to be, calculated for the general good and safety of the community.
We can’t understand what we’ve accomplished on civil rights without telling the story of Bayard Rustin. And now, we must write the next chapter in the American civil rights story by drawing strength and inspiration from his moral courage.
Civil liberties victories never stay won, but must be fought for over and over again.
Question: Does it frost Jackson, Jesse Jackson, that someone like Obama, who fits the stereotype blacks once labeled as an Oreo — a black on the outside, a white on the inside — that an Oreo should be the beneficiary of the long civil rights struggle which Jesse Jackson spent his lifetime fighting for?
The greatest achievement of the civil-rights movement is that it has restored the dignity of indignation.
We’ve talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.
Our government just won’t enforce civil rights laws. The laws will be ignored.
The Civil Rights for Musicians Act is about economic justice for African American artists. It’s about what’s right. And it’s about time.
When I wrote the song, The Way It Is, I wanted to move people to take a stand on civil rights in this country.
I think there are profound differences between the civil rights struggle for African Americans and the civil rights struggle for gay Americans.
The civil rights of none, shall be abridged on account of religious belief or worship, nor shall any national religion be established, nor shall the full and equal rights of conscience be in any manner, or on any pretext infringed.
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.
The mainstream sort of presentation of the civil rights movement was not something that I directly inherited.
During Black History Month, I’m reminded yet again of the ways that the struggle for civil rights is interwoven with the struggle for workers’ rights.
When Maricopa County Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio cracked down on illegal immigration without getting permission from Obama, they threatened to revoke his 287(g) status. When Sheriff Joe refused to balk, they filed suit against him with a frivolous civil rights claim.
[A.J. Muste] was very influenced – in – influential in the peace movement, in the civil rights movement.
If you only make fights that you’re going to win, there would be no women’s vote in America, there would be no civil rights laws in the country.
Every segment of our population, and every individual, has a right to expect from his government a fair deal.
I’ve gone beyond civil rights and human rights to creation rights.
You spend so much time barking up the civil-rights tree, you don’t even know there’s a human-rights tree on the same floor.
School choice is the civil rights issue of the 21st century.
I always wondered why there weren’t any films about Cesar Chavez. There are movies about other civil rights leaders in this country, but why not Chavez?
At the foundation of our civil liberties lies the principle that denies to government officials an exceptional position before the law and which subjects them to the same rules of conduct that are commands to the citizen.
I think many of the ideas that opened up in the ’60s got implemented in the ’70s and that certain minority voices that were not being heard in the ’60s, like women and gay people, were being heard in the ’70s. Black Civil Rights had also found its foothold, and those ideas were also very pertinent.
Victimize gun owners, then blame the victims. That’s the Chicago Way, and it will never change as long as city bosses are pathological in their hatred of our civil rights.
We know of no more crucial civil rights issue facing Congress today than the need to increase the federal minimum wage and extend its coverage.
Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents’ then-illegal and interracial marriage.
The government has created a nation of paper criminals. People can be put in jail and lose civil rights and liberties through bureaucratic procedures.The only thing that is keeping you out of jail is government goodwill.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
My earliest memories are when my father was the attorney general at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. We would go to visit him at the Justice Department and take the tunnel over to the FBI building and watch the sharpshooters at practice.
This provision (the 4th Amendment) speaks for itself. Its plain object is to secure the perfect enjoyment of that great right of the common law, that a man’s house shall be his own castle, privileged against all civil and military intrusion.
The choice is not between violence and nonviolence but between nonviolence and nonexistence.
While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet.
We must trust our own thinking. Trust where we’re going. And get the job done.
The social issues outside of football are not as defined as they were earlier, when integration took place and certain rights were legislated. The Civil Rights movement is over. Individuals can buy homes wherever they want, travel first class wherever they want, eat wherever they want.
My dad was a civil rights lawyer, and he was actually defending conscientious objectors to the Vietnam War.
I think that the thing that we learned back in the day of the civil rights movement is that you do have to keep on keeping on.
When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement.
Diversity in books is a civil rights frontier.
[Democrats] are not handling the John Lewis flap the right way, clearly. John Lewis is a hero and a civil rights hero.
It is an insult for me to have been alive through the times you are calling the so-called civil rights movement. I don’t celebrate my humiliations and my insults.
No one is immune from the larger events of his or her time – the Depression, World War II, civil rights, Vietnam, the spring of 1989 in China. These events intrude upon our lives and radically affect our directions.
Are you kidding me? It’s insane that civil rights are being denied people in this day and age. It’s embarrassing, and it’s heartbreaking. It goes without saying that I’m completely in support of gay marriage. In 10 years we’ll be ashamed that this was an issue.
The environment is the most important, the most fundamental, civil-rights issue…. Four out of every five toxic-waste dumps in America is in a black neighborhood.
Bolsonaro is a tropical Trump. They have a very common agenda, a very regressive agenda, when it comes to civil rights, social rights, and environmental rights.
I also wish that the Pledge of Allegiance were directed at the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, as it is when the President takes his oath of office, rather than to the flag and the nation
I’d like to continue being involved with issues that animated my time as attorney general – criminal-justice reform and civil rights especially. I don’t just want to give speeches; I’d like to involve myself in this work in a systematic way.
Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.
If a police officer is looking for a criminal, he or she might stop a number of people in that particular area and ask to see their driver’s license. No one bellyaches about civil rights or privacy issues. We’re just happy the cops are trying to find the bad guy.
It’s soul force that removed the English from India. It’s soul force that brought down the Berlin Wall. It’s soul force that gave life to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s struggle for civil rights.
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
We have to “walk the walk” not just “talk the talk”.
It’s so simple: Right to marriage is a civil right, which like all civil rights should not depend on what state you happen to live in.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 represented precisely such a hope – that America had learned from its past and acted to secure a better tomorrow.
I have been a long and strong supporter of civil rights in my whole career. I led the fight to get the voting rights act re-enacted. I have been a strong supporter of affirmative action. I believe in it strongly.
During past years, like frightened children, we were afraid to eat the strong meat of human rights and instead sucked the milk of civil rights from the breasts of white liberals, black Uncle Toms, and Aunt Jemimas.
No provision in our Constitution ought to be dearer to man than that which protects the rights of conscience against the enterprises of the civil authority.
Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’
Anyone who said he wasn’t afraid during the civil rights movement was either a liar or without imagination. I was scared all the time. My hands didn’t shake but inside I was shaking.
The arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.
Obama has little or nothing to do with the civil-rights movement. His roots are in Kenya, and he is shaped far more by anti-colonialism than by anything that Martin Luther King said or did.
Mr. Sessions’ conduct as a U.S. Attorney, from his politically-motivated voting fraud prosecutions to his indifference toward criminal violations of civil rights laws, indicated that he lacks the temperament, fairness and judgment to be a federal judge.
This thing called Patriot Act, through which we abdicated a lot of our civil rights to defend the country against terrorism, it’s a four-year story.
Education is the civil rights issue of our generation.
Through electing officials that will protect the Constitution and commit themselves to the rights of the people and the health of the nation, we will be able to ensure that no group of ideologues and no private sector institution can coopt our rights, take us into senseless wars and steal the nation from its people.
Governments exist to protect the rights of minorities. The loved and the rich need no protection: they have many friends and few enemies.
The true foundation of republican government is the equal right of every citizen in his person and property and in their management.
We’re still a racist country, but we’ve come a long way since the civil rights eras and we are still a homophobic country, but we’ve come a long way in that regard. And we still got a war on marijuana and have come along in that regard.
You reached your level, you don’t want any more. We asked ten years ago, we were askin’ with the Panthers, we were askin’ in the Civil Rights Movement. Now those who were askin’ are all dead or in jail, wo what are we gonna do? And we shouldn’t be angry!?
A rioter with a Molotov cocktail in his hands is not fighting for civil rights any more than a Klansman with a sheet on his back and mask on his face. They are both more or less what the law declares them: lawbreakers, destroyers of constitutional rights and liberties and ultimately destroyers of a free America.
Every advance in this half-century-Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education, one after another-came with the support and leadership of American Labor.
I believe that what I’ve worked for – women and children, civil rights against poverty, trying to level the playing field for people to have a better chance – is what I still believe is important and what I’m trying to do today.
We need not throw away 200 years of American jurisprudence while we fight terrorism. We need not choose between our most deeply held values, and keeping this nation safe.
The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.
Any new legal measures, or cooperative arrangements between government and companies meant to keep people from organizing violence or criminal actions, must not be carried out in ways that erode due process, rule of law and the protection of innocent citizens’ political and civil rights.
No person has the right to rain on your dreams.
I got out of the Army – in my world – I came to New York, for instance, when the civil rights movement was just beginning, and that created a certain energy, a certain rumble, a certain impetus for black actors.
The liberals of the eighteenth century, guided by the ideas of natural law and of the Enlightenment, demanded for everyone equality of political and civil rights… Nothing, however, is as ill-founded as the assertion of the alleged equality of all members of the human race.
I think it’s important to remember that civil rights and economic rights are mutually dependent.
A little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.
My dad was a member of the Greatest Generation that achieved victory in World War II. This was the generation that saved the world from fascism, came home and built the great American middle class, led the way in the civil rights movement, protected our environment, and created great programs like Medicare.
The minorities have been confined to the city by a moat of bigotry.
Our scientific power has outrun our spiritual power. We have guided missiles and misguided men.
I recall saying that civil rights organizations, when they demand more than is legitimate, it hurts their position.
I’ve been there for so many crossroads in American history. My whole political life spans the birth of the environmental movement, the women’s movement, the civil rights movement, putting an end to unjust wars, and so and so.
The vast majority of us don’t want to face the fact that we’re in the middle of a sweeping social revolution. In sex. In spiritual values. In opposition to wars no one wants. In opposition to government big-brotherhood. In civil rights. In basic human goals. They’re all facets of a general upheaval.
My parents were civil rights activists, and my mother was active in the feminist movement. Issues concerning marginalized people and especially women of color were what they cared about most in the world.
Somebody who was born in this country who visited China would later face difficulty getting back in to the USA. We have to keep in mind that the struggles of the Chinese against these exclusion laws really laid down the foundations of civil rights law.
I was a child coming up in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement.
Bolivia was the first country to stop hyperinflation in a democracy without depriving people of their civil rights and without violating human rights.
The black revolt is as palpable in letters as it is in the streets.
The Framers of the Bill of Rights did not purport to ‘create’ rights. Rather, they designed the Bill of Rights to prohibit our Government from infringing rights and liberties presumed to be preexisting.
I would much rather engage people in a conversation about deregulation and reversals of women’s rights and civil rights and LGBT rights than conversations about Russian interference.
Neither my great-grandfather an NAACP founder, my grandfather Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr. an NAACP leader, my father Rev. A. D. Williams King, nor my uncle Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. embraced the homosexual agenda that the current NAACP is attempting to label as a civil rights agenda.
My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined legal and nonviolent pressure.
Production of identity is a resistance element, an aggressive element. Both a refusal and an affirmation and an assertion, and certainly, we in Jamaica were talking about black art. And the idea that there is a role for art in the civil rights revolution and in the successor to the civil rights revolution.
Civil rights leaders are involved in helping poor people. That’s what I’ve been doing all my life.
I was very much a part of the civil rights era, so, of course, my fantasy was to marry some outstanding black gentleman, a leader – someone like Martin Luther King who was doing something for black people.
The people never give up their liberties but under some delusion.
Racism has always been able to come up with a scientific veneer.
In the ’60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn’t just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time.
From the end of Reconstruction through the civil rights revolution, the South was an almost uniformly Democratic region. In 1936, for example, Franklin Roosevelt won more than 98 percent of the vote in South Carolina.
I believe that what is legislated bleeds down into everything. So if the legislation continues to uphold anything that doesn’t support equal rights and civil rights, that bleeds down into Matthew Shepard being murdered.
If the question [before justices of the peace] relate to any point of public liberty, or if it be one of those in which the judges may be suspected of bias, the jury undertake to decide both law and fact.
I see America through the eyes of the victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.
When LBJ signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the modern Southern GOP was born.
Whenever the people are well informed, they can be trusted with their own government; that whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights.
The only politician anybody ever believed was Kennedy, anyway. Kennedy, Martin Luther King – civil rights always turns out in bloody war. Where’s his dream now? When is a change going to come – as Sam Cooke said – for blacks in America? Anyone who does tell the truth gets a bullet in the head, y’know what I mean?
Make men wise, and by that very operation you make them free. Civil liberty follows as a consequence of this; no usurped power can stand against the artillery of opinion.
As members of the oldest civil rights organization in the nation, NRA members know tyranny when we see it.
I, like many members of my generation, was concerned with segregation and the repeated violation of civil rights.
This formidable censor of the public functionaries [the press], by arraigning them at the tribunal of public opinion, produces reform peaceably, which must otherwise be done by revolution. It is also the best instrument for enlightening the mind of man and improving him as a rational, moral, and social being.
For the past several years, I’ve been harboring a fantasy, a last political crusade for the baby-boom generation. We, who started on the path of righteousness, marching for civil rights and against the war in Vietnam, need to find an appropriately high-minded approach to life’s exit ramp.
I don’t think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.
Preferential affirmative action patronizes American blacks, women, and others by presuming that they cannot succeed on their own. Preferential affirmative action does not advance civil rights in this country.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.
The Civil Rights Movement, it wasn’t just a couple of, you know, superstars like Martin Luther King. It was thousands and thousands – millions, I should say – of people taking risks, becoming leaders in their community.
My parents both were doing the Civil Rights Movement, were very involved with the civil rights to Congress. And my friends’ parents were as well.
Respectfully, the civil rights movement for people with disabilities is modeled on the African American civil rights movement. I’m old enough to remember 1964. I was a junior in high school.
It’s not a question of being out of touch or traditional. It’s a question of wanting to preserve marriage as uniquely between a man and a woman. Gays get full civil rights with civil partnerships anyway.
There are a million Negroes in Mississippi. I think they’ll take care of me.
The investigation of the rights of the slave has led me to a better understanding of my own. I have found the anti-slavery cause to be … the school in which human rights are more fully investigated and better understood and taught than in any other.
I am a Democrat and disagree with virtually all of President Trump’s policy positions, including those on healthcare, LGBTQ rights, civil rights, immigration, global warming, gun control, and tax ‘reform.’
There’s a lot of hip-hop that’s oriented toward a progressive view of America because it’s oriented toward a civil rights progress and a critique of the power structure.
Mr. President, passage of this bill will visit the heel of oppression on all the people, vitiate their constitutional shield against tyranny, and materially hasten the destruction of the best design for self-government yet devised by the minds of men. Its passage will mark one of the darkest days in history
Every man is under the natural duty of contributing to the necessities of the society; and this is all the laws should enforce on him.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual doom.
We cannot sit around and talk about the beloved community.
The day for the Negro man being a coward is over.
The war on drugs to me is absolutely phoney, its so obviously phoney, ok? It’s a war against our civil rights, that’s all it is. They’re using it to make us afraid to go out at night, afraid of each other, so that we lock ourselves in our homes and they get suspending our rights one by one.
Education is the single-most important civil rights issue that we face today.
We are confronted primarily with a moral issue… whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.
We must remember that a right lost to one is lost to all.
It is distressing to me that we live in an age in which we still must fight to protect our civil rights as Americans, in which a hate crime perpetrated against someone based their sexual orientation can go unpunished, and in which discrimination is being written into our laws.
I was born in a ghetto on the North Side of Pittsburgh. I was born as Emmett Till was dying and the civil rights era was being born.
I’m the world’s original gradualist. I just think ninety-odd years is gradual enough.
Black women fought for the right to vote during the suffrage movement and fought again during the civil rights movement. The rote narrative in the press of the civil rights movement is truncated with the briefest of histories of men like Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, or John Lewis.
For centuries, faith has helped us overcome problems and helped us work to achieve a more perfect union. It has inspired the many leaders who played a key role in abolishing slavery, protecting civil rights and, hopefully one day, becoming a nation where all life from conception to natural death is protected.
I think hip-hop has definitely brought the black experience to white kids more than the civil rights movement did and more than any teacher’s well-intentioned lecture on Martin Luther King did.
Connecticut is proud of the human rights legacy of Thomas Dodd, and the work of the University of Connecticut to build on that legacy through the Dodd Human Rights Impact initiative. We are also proud of our Commission on Human and Civil Rights as a tireless defender of the equal rights for all of our community members.
The Pledge of Allegiance says “…with liberty and justice for all.” What part of “all” don’t you understand?
Frederick Douglass had charged the air with rebellion and redemption, and these in turn had supported him in the heat of abolitionism. But the atmosphere changed to one of repression after the Civil Rights Act of 1875.
Until civil rights are enjoyed by all of us, we’re simply not civilized.
Each state, so that it does not abridge the great fundamental rights belonging, under the Constitution, to all citizens, may grant or withhold such civil rights as it pleases; all that is required is that, in this respect, its laws shall be impartial.
Without prayer, without faith in the Almighty, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings.
Homosexuality is not about love, it’s not about family, and it’s not about civil rights.
In college, I got interested in news because the world was coming apart. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women’s right movement. That focused my radio ambitions toward news.
Where is the civil rights groundswell on behalf of stronger marriages that will allow more children to grow up in two-parent families and have a better chance of staying out of poverty?
In 1962, the smallest things were upsetting to authority. It wasn’t the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t the Anti-war Movement. It was something else, but it was a harbinger of what was to come.
I knew someone had to take the first step. So I made up my mind not to move.
Because of tax laws governing charities, including almost every single civil rights organization you’ve ever heard of, including the NAACP, the Urban League, the ACLU, and others, those organizations are not allowed to endorse political candidates or use their resources in political campaigns of any kind.
Just as the white man and every other person on this earth has God-given rights, natural rights, civil rights, any kind of rights that you can think of, when it comes to defending himself, black people – we should have the right to defend ourselves also.
Evan Wolfson is a dear friend of mine. Almost more than any other, Evan is responsible for bringing the issue of marriage equality to the forefront of our struggle for civil rights. He is a courageous pioneer who has been relentless in this battle for marriage equality.
It was so crucial to the Civil Rights Movement that on June 23, 1963, Martin Luther King came to town, walked down Woodward Avenue with more than 100,000 people and delivered the first major public iteration of his “I Have A Dream” speech, two months before he did it in Washington.
The civil rights movement wasn’t easy for anybody.
I’ve fixed hard problems of all kinds, civil rights and business problems. It’s the stuff I like to do, and I’m good at it, as a matter of fact… and I never left my conscience at the door.
You know, civil rights is great and everything, but a lot of people don’t realize that plumbers in the South make less money than when they used to install separate drinking fountains.
Persistence. Change doesn’t happen overnight. You have to stay with it. Rosa Parks helped start the Civil Rights movement in earnest in 1955. Then it was nearly a decade until the Civil Rights Act was passed.
The Democrats pretended to care about black people for about five minutes to help their electoral process, and then civil rights suddenly became abortion on demand, gay marriage, rights for the homeless, etc.
When poor people get involved in a long conflict, such as a strike or a civil rights drive, and the pressure increases each day, there is a deep need for spiritual advice. Without it, we see families crumble, leadership weaken, and hard workers grow tired.
In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as ‘right-to-work.’ It provides no ‘rights’ and no ‘works.’ Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining…. We demand this fraud be stopped.
In the ’60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn’t just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time.
Rarely in my 45 years as a civil rights lawyer have I been so angry about an injustice as I am about what happened to Billy Ray Johnson.
The only real prison is fear, and the only real freedom is freedom from fear
Unconditional love will have the final word in reality.
Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement.
Civil rights is unfinished business. Make it your business.
I was proud to march beside some of the most notable Civil Rights activists, such as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Rev. Jesse Jackson, and Joseph L. Rauh, Jr., from Selma to Montgomery.
President [Barack] Obama is a man who had certain advantages because of the civil rights movement.
The prison guards are capable of committing daily atrocities and obscenities, smiling the smile of the angels all the while.
Black lives, of course, matter. I spent 50 years of my life fighting for civil rights and for dignity, but if you don’t want me to be here, that’s OK. I don’t want to out-scream people.
After years as a civil rights lawyer, I rarely find myself speechless.
Coming to the civil rights movement in the twentieth century, we begin to have this idea that’s still with us today, which is that the main purpose of public education is closing achievement gaps.
Let’s look at two things real quickly: the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the Sixties and the Arab Spring starting in Tunisia and Cairo. What they had in common was people who were told, and who believed inside themselves, that they were a certain way, and the society at large believed it.
Because when we look at the modern civil rights movement under the leadership of my father and the team that he developed, it was at the federal level that we were able to appeal to bring about justice, whether it was in relationship to voting rights – just a number of issues.
One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole – yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis).
We’ve seen it again and again. From civil rights to women’s rights to marriage rights, this country has reinvented itself in the quest to make real the transcendent values that Lincoln proclaimed in his historic address – that all men are created equal in a nation conceived in liberty.
Give to every human being every right that you claim for yourself.
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.
We support President Truman’s civil rights program.
The foundation of the house of civil rights is in the voices of all the great civil rights leaders and the soul of every person who heard them. It’s in the hands of every person who folded a leaflet for change, and it’s in the courage of every person who changed.
The Internet has introduced an enormously accessible and egalitarian platform for creating, sharing and obtaining information on a global scale. As a result, we have new ways to allow people to exercise their human and civil rights.
I believe it is my obligation to tell the story of the civil rights movement to the next generation.
Maybe it’s because my uncle and my parents were always very involved with the civil rights movement, so I just grew up and I was raised that you have to speak out and look out for your fellow man, woman, and child.
I do think it’s extremely important to acknowledge the gains that were made by the civil rights movement, the black power movement.Institutional transformations happened directly as a result of the movements that people, unnamed people, organized and gave their lives to.
Like most Americans of my age, I was very impressed by the dynamic capacities of the law, demonstrated by the Civil Rights Movement and then Watergate, animated by Sam Ervin’s mantra that no person is above the law.
Restriction of free thought and free speech is the most dangerous of all subversions. It is the one un-American act that could most easily defeat us.
The merchants will manage [commerce] the better, the more they are left free to manage for themselves.
The civil rights movement would experience many important victories, but Rosa Parks will always be remembered as its catalyst.
At the same time the folk boom was happening, the civil rights movement was happening, the anti-war movement was happening, the ban the bomb movement was happening, the environmental movement was happening. There was suddenly a generation ready to change the course of history.
Well, my view before was a Western view, and I certainly understand marriage equality and civil rights, equal rights for all, but having visited developing nations and some of the poorest nations in the world, I realize how deep it goes and how much work really needs to be done to create equality for all.
I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.
The civil rights fight was a very important fight.
At my direction, the Department’s Office for Civil Rights remains committed to investigating all claims of discrimination, bullying, and harassment against those who are most vulnerable in our schools.
We are a nation of innovators and problem-solvers who sparked revolutions in democratic government, civil rights, communications, flight, rural electrification and technology. We are a country defined by ideals now in need of rescue.
On the court, Jason Collins is not a huge basketball star, but he has already claimed his place in civil rights history as the first openly gay athlete to play in one of the four major U.S. sports leagues.
When you live in the South, you’re constantly part of the civil rights movement.
We must protect the right of our opponents to speak because we must hear what they have to say.
Historians have often censored civil rights activists’ commitment to economic issues and misrepresented the labor and civil rights movements as two separate, sometimes adversarial efforts. But civil rights and workers’ rights are two sides of the same coin.
Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself.
The so-called civil rights movement as it exists today is used as a Communist program for revolution in America.
I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience
At some point in our lifetime, gay marriage won’t be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he was black.
Power always has to be kept in check; power exercised in secret, especially under the cloak of national security, is doubly dangerous.
When the government violates the people’s rights, insurrection is, for the people and for each portion of the people, the most sacred of the rights and the most indispensible of duties.
It’s a misconception to believe that the resistance ended with the civil rights movement.
Demanding domestic security in times of war invites carelessness in preserving civil liberties and the right of privacy. Frequently the people are only too anxious for their freedoms to be sacrificed on the altar of authoritarianism thought to be necessary to remain safe and secure.
My father wanted me to be a dentist like him, or any doctor, really. There was this attitude of, ‘The civil rights movement was not about you being an artist.’
The Klan had used fear, intimidation and murder to brutally oppress over African-Americans who sought justice and equality and it sought to respond to the young workers of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the same way.
In giving rights to others which belong to them, we give rights to ourselves and to our country
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it.
The civil rights movement didn’t end on August 6, 1965. It continued because the work of creating a truly equal country never ends.
We have a tendency to sugar coat the Civil Rights movement by showing arm in arm and everyone singing ‘Kumbaya’. We don’t really always show the resistance from the government, the resistance from the status quo, from the majority to silence the movement.
Everyone cares for disabled people, right? What they don’t care for are genuine civil rights for disabled people. MARY JOHNSON tells the tortuous, enraging story of how Congress enacted a law that instead of protecting against discrimination has turned ‘the disabled’ into a political punching bag.
I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, the classroom is the place to start. Great teaching is about so much more than education; it is a daily fight for social justice.
They were beginning to burn churches. They were beginning to move beyond crosses… They burned churches because they understood that the Christian faith was what inspired the movement and kept it going.
And to me, that’s why the civil rights era is about the future, not about the past, because it’s great lessons of how citizens can organize to call on the patriotic heritage of the country to tackle some of our most intractable problems and we need to do that again.
Protecting the rights of service members was an important part of my work as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.
I think I came here as a priest… The priest is more concerned with heresy than with sin; sins can be forgiven; heresy must be eliminated.
If I’m a racist, why is one of the top civil rights activists of the 1960s asking me to be a centerpiece of the MLK dinner. Why am I the only one who has the guts to stand up to this Democrat Media Complex that insists that black people must exist on the Democrat plantation.
Democracy is not the law of the majority but the protection of the minority.
I think, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks will go down as one of the two most well-known and remembered figures out of the Civil Rights Movement.
He didn’t even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. it had to be some silly little Communist.
Only in the darkness can you see the stars.
It is interesting that both Chicano and Puerto Rican art in the United States form an important part of the Civil Rights legacy and dialog.
NEA includes most bizarre & extreme misuse of tax funds.
Inspired by Alex Haley’s ‘Roots,’ at the age of 11 I began a handwritten Middle Passage story called ‘Lawdy, Lawdy, Make Us Free.’ I was raised by civil rights activists with a very strong sense of racial history and consciousness.
For those who have envisioned the State of Israel to be a democracy, which although primarily a Jewish polity for Jews is one in which non-Jews can become citizens and enjoy equal civil rights with the Jewish majority, the question of natural law is the question of human rights.
I explained to the president that I’ve been pleased with my conversations with the Attorney General and Civil Rights Division regarding their helpful understanding that they aren’t taking over this investigation, but are conducting a parallel review of the events that led to Michael Brown’s death.
There are many photos of Catholic priests and nuns marching in the Civil Rights movement, most notably at the March on Selma, Ala. in 1965. However, the history of Catholicism in this country tells a different story.
Dwight Eisenhower has been underestimated, which may relate to his advanced age in office, his somewhat uneven communications skills, and his failure to present a forward-looking vision on the rising issue of civil rights.
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.
We have the history of slavery or inequality to women, and now the civil rights movement of the 21st century is the struggle for equality for the gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender people. And I think it’s important for Americans to know about the times that we failed.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been interested in issues of social justice, political freedom, and civil rights.
After the Civil War, when blacks fought along whites to secure freedom for all, southern states enacted Black Codes, laws that restricted the civil rights and liberties of blacks. Central to the enforcement of these laws were the stiff penalties for blacks possessing firearms.
You grow up with a heightened sense of the Civil Rights Movement, but I think it wasn’t until I became of age that I really had a great appreciation for the struggle that took place.
The civil rights movement in the United States was about the same thing, about equality of treatment for all sections of the people, and that is precisely what our movement was about
Even as we continue to carry the banner of civil rights and environmental justice, we’ve also got to focus on many, many people – for them, life starts with a good job.
I never praised Mr. Snowden or said his actions rise to those of Mohandas Gandhi or other civil rights leaders.
I’ve always found the rhetoric of mainstream civil rights leaders and organizations to be far too timid, accommodationist, and gradualist. It always seemed to me that they behaved like meek and gentle supplicants begging the oppressor for a few crumbs of justice, for a few molecules of citizenship rights.
The psychedelic issue is a civil rights and civil liberties issue. It is an issue concerned with the most basic of human freedoms: religious practice and the privacy of the individual mind.
Well, it’s the last step of the civil rights movement: You know, wrap your hands around some money, right?
I don’t think there are any pure Africans of the African Americans, but the African part of our history was pretty much taken away from us during slavery, so the 60s gave us a chance, because of the civil rights movement, to kind of re-examine and make some sort of formal connection to our African-ness.
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.
When I think about our HBCUs, I think of icons like my mentor Jim Clyburn, a South Carolina State graduate, who fought against discrimination and segregation, and continues to champion for civil rights and equality.
Private enterprise manages so much better all the concerns to which it is equal.
I think the authors of that notable instrument [the Declaration of Independence] intended to include all men.
If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
As the civil rights struggle progressed, Americans responded to the justice of the cause, shedding layers of the crusty armor that shielded the white majority from contact with its large black minority. There are layers left. It feels so much better to be on good terms with one another.
In the view of some people, you can only believe in civil rights if you work as a civil rights lawyer. I just don’t buy that.
It’s ludicrous that my friends in California aren’t able to legally get married. It’s a civil rights issue. In 20 years we’re going to look back at tapes of these antigay people saying ridiculous things on the news and it’s going to sound as antiquated as the newsreels of horrible racists from the ’50s.
The crucial role communists played in organizing industrial unions in the 1930s and struggling for social reforms, peace, and civil rights strengthened rather then undermined democratic forces.
Black Realism or cosmopolitan black politician is a code word to say this is a black person that is not tied to a civil rights/black power traditional black politics.
I am absolutely comfortable with the fact that men marrying men, women marrying women, and heterosexual men and women marrying another are entitled to the same exact rights, all the civil rights, all the civil liberties. And quite frankly, I don’t see much of a distinction beyond that.
We need to end qualified immunity at the federal level, where police can violate a person’s civil rights with impunity, which we’ve seen happening time and time again.
It’s a good bet that if Jesse Jackson calls something a ‘civil rights issue,’ it’s not.
I had advocated the establishment of a Negro industrial commission. I had gestured against the growth of monopoly power. I had introduced a few civil rights bills.
When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.
No government can be maintained without the principle of fear as well as duty. Good men will obey the last, but bad ones the former only. If our government ever fails, it will be from this weakness.
Some of the most moving experiences I’ve had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.
The first thing I said to myself on 9/11 was, ‘There go our civil rights.’ I found out by comparing notes later that George Carlin and I both said that at the exact same time. That’s the first thing that popped into our head.
To me, I know that if we could pass the Civil Rights Act of ’64 over 50 years ago, then we can pass Justice for All Civil Rights Act. We can pass Medicare for All.
To have a show have lawyers fighting civil rights cases week in and week out, I think it’s exactly what we need.
There’s nothing entertaining about watching goons hurl venomous slurs at congressmen like the civil rights hero John Lewis and the openly gay Barney Frank. How curious that a mob fond of likening President Obama to Hitler knows so little about history that it doesn’t recognize its own small-scale mimicry of Kristallnacht.
While nothing is perfect or complete in the battle for civil rights, the efforts of Dr. King and those like him have in fact, changed the country and the world for the better in noticeable ways. His vision has made the world a more equal place, and if not equal, it has helped to ensure that minorities have a voice.
Judge Roberts’ civil rights record and views remained the most controversial and unexplained part of his record when the Judiciary Committee hearing concluded, just as his civil rights record and views had been the most controversial part of his record when the hearing began.
Contrary to the claims of the supporters of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the sponsors of H.Res. 676, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 did not improve race relations or enhance freedom. Instead, the forced integration dictated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 increased racial tensions while diminishing individual liberty.
I am entirely persuaded that the agitations of the public mind advance its powers, and that at every vibration between the points of liberty and despotism, something will be gained for the former. As men become better informed, their rulers must respect them the more.
Where does a black soul go to rest?
In the summer of 1964, my sister and I went to South Ballston, Virginia, to stay with my aunt and her kids. They passed the civil rights bill that summer; my cousins were so happy because now they could swim in the pool.
Quotas are a perfectly logical, if diabolical, extension of the regulation of private property courtesy of the Civil Rights Act, whereby in an attempt to shape American society in politically pleasing ways, people have been coerced into liking, hiring or renting against their will or better judgment.
Our particular principles of religion are a subject of accountability to God alone.
I have written 13 books, full of my ideas about a variety of issues – from black women, to hip-hop culture, to the civil rights struggle. Even when I address such figures as Tupac Shakur and Bill Cosby, my ideas are quite evident.
The nation’s government has just handed me the bill that grants us our civil rights. I am receiving it before you, certain that I am accepting this on behalf of all Argentinean women, and I can feel my hands tremble with joy as they grasp the laurel proclaiming victory.
I had been involved in the March on Washington in 1963. I was with friends carrying a sign, ‘Protestants, Jews and Catholics for Civil Rights.’
I would have voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement.
I support the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act.
We are not makers of history. We are made by history.
My mom went through civil rights; my dad went through civil rights. My name was Kenya because they wanted to give me an African name.
My mother supported me from the beginning and never said you should be an activist or civil rights leader or minister.
A second line is in effect a civil rights demonstration. Literally, demonstrating the civil right of the community to assemble in the street for peaceful purposes. Or, more simply, demonstrating the civil right of the community to exist.
Governor Sanders showed true leadership and character by supporting civil rights for all during a time when many were not, His lasting positive impact on our state will be felt by many future generations of Georgians.
We have to put a stop to the idea that it is a part of everybody’s civil rights to say whatever he pleases.
Justice is indivisible. You can’t decide who gets civil rights and who doesn’t.
President Eisenhower was a fine general and a good, decent man, but if he had fought World War II the way he fought for civil rights, we would all be speaking German now.
Knowing what must be done does away with fear.
The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.
Evil societies always kill their consciences.
The Underground Railroad, which was the first integrated civil rights movement, is a part of our history that not a lot of us know about. And it’s actually a very empowering side of our history.
The Court today completes the process of converting Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 from a guarantee that race or sex will not be the basis for often will.
Civil liberty can be established on no foundation of human reason which will not at the same time demonstrate the right of religious freedom.
We demand that segregation be ended in every school district in the year 1963! We demand that we have effective civil rights legislation – no compromise, no filibuster – and that include public accommodations, decent housing, integrated education, FEPC and the right to vote.
No man is above the law, and no man is below it.
I am very proud of the fact that I led the arts contingent on the civil rights march in the summer of ’63. In many ways, I think it was the high-water mark of the civil rights movement.
Many thought that the abolition of slavery, the end of Jim Crow, and the legislative progress of the Civil Rights Era, among other watershed moments, would have fundamentally done away with the racist structures that have long oppressed black people. However, we know that has been far from the case.
I’m immensely proud to be a Democrat because of our party’s history of fighting for justice, fairness, and equality. From Roosevelt to Obama, we’ve worked to bring seniors and children out of poverty, expanded civil rights, supported science and research, and pushed for equality of opportunity.
