The Civil Rights Movement Quotes & Sayings

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. — Peter Beinart

The words 'bad timing' came to be ghosts haunting our every move in Birmingham. Yet people who used this argument were ignorant of the background of our planning ... they did not realize that it was ridiculous to speak of timing when the clock of history showed that the Negro had already suffered one hundred years of delay. — Martin Luther King Jr.

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. — Danny Glover

I loved the land that surrounded me but hated the history that haunted that land. — Mark Kemp

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. — Jose Antonio Vargas

I want those in what I call the regressive left who are reading this exchange to understand that the first stage in the empowerment of any minority community is the liberation of reformist voices within that community so that its members can take responsibility for themselves and overcome the first hurdle to genuine empowerment: the victimhood mentality. This is what the American civil rights movement achieved, by shifting the debate. Martin Luther King Jr. and other leaders took responsibility for their own communities and acted in a positive and empowering way, instead of constantly playing the victim card or rioting in the streets. Perpetuating this groupthink mind-set is both extremely dangerous and in fact disempowering. — Sam Harris

There was a resistance movement in the white community, and there was a determined civil rights movement by our neighbors and friends in the African-American community. They had right on their side. They conducted themselves in high standards, with courage and determination, and they were victorious. They overcame. — Jeff Sessions

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. — John Conyers

The Obama years will be remembered as a cultural - and legal - tipping point for equality for all people who do not identify as strictly heterosexual, arguably the civil rights movement of our times. The president signed the bill repealing 'don't ask, don't tell.' The Defense of Marriage Act was struck down by the Supreme Court. — Charles M. Blow

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!? — Tupac Shakur

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. — Carol Moseley Braun

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. — Michael Eric Dyson

I walked straight to the library. Mrs. Bloom, the librarian, always knows everything. — Augusta Scattergood

The amazing aftermath of Birmingham, the sweeping Negro Revolution, revealed to people all over the land that there are no outsiders in all these fifty states of America. When a police dog buried his fangs in the ankle of a small child in Birmingham, he buried his fangs in the ankle of every American. The bell of man's inhumanity to man does not toll for any one man. It tolls for you, for me, for all of us. — Martin Luther King Jr.

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. — Charles B. Rangel

When Congress gets through investigating Attorney General Janet Reno, will her agency become known as the Obstruction of Justice Department? The civil rights movement was one of the great moral crusades in the first half of the twentieth century. Unfortunately, in more recent times it has become all too much like those it opposed, demanding racial double standards and even condoning verbal and violent attacks against members of other races. — Thomas Sowell

I sat there listening to "We Shall Overcome," looking out of the window at the passing Mississippi landscape. — Anne Moody

Often ignored by civil rights historians, a number of campaigns led to trials and even convictions throughout the South. These cases, many virtually unknown, broke with Southern tradition and fractured the philosophical and political foundations of white supremacy by challenging the relationship between sexual domination and racial equality. — Danielle L. McGuire

The trouble is, SMers are allowing themselves to be defined by what they are not. We think, "Oh, so many people believe that we're all murderers and rapists, and we have to explain that we're not!" Uh so, a slogan for the gay civil rights movement should be "Normal, Non-threatening and Not After Your Children"? — Laura Antoniou

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. — John Lewis

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. — Lawrence Wright

I think my experience at the University of Chicago, working in the civil rights movement, working in the peace movement, working with community organizations, did a lot to influence the politics that I have. — Bernie Sanders

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive. — Cory Booker

The problem with you middle-class gay guys is, you pass for white. You move to the metropolitan gay centres, and you're more or less closeted--"private", you'd call it--when you step outside the ghetto. You assimilate yourselves, and suddenly you've got property to protect and money invested. I ask you, what impelled the militants of the civil rights movement of the sixties? You know what impelled them? They had nothing to lose. That's how they could brave the police dogs and the fire hoses. Even torture and death. Could you have done that? — Ethan Mordden

Our involvement in the civil rights movement is what sent us into our involvement against apartheid. — Mary Jane Patterson

This myth of meritocracy and equal opportunities encourages individualism over collective action, because when people believe this myth, they obviously see no need for protest movements around particular classes or identities, such as the Women's Movement or the Civil Rights workplace, education or in their personal lives, they are more likely to blame themselves, rather than sexism, racism, class oppression or homophobia; concepts which in current society are often seen as out of date. This type of blame even applies to experiences of actual violence or harassment with too many people believing that it is their fault if they are sexually harassed in the workplace or at school, abused by a partner or are a victim of sexual violence. Our society encourages this view, and in turn, that keeps people isolated and alone, rather than providing them the opportunity to get involved in collective struggles against such common experiences. — Finn Mackay

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. — Bell Hooks

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. — Robert David Hall

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. — George Clooney

As Dr. King said, an injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. It is that creed of the civil rights movement that still motivates us today ... So today, we take up the cause of joining arms with our immigrant brothers and sisters in that spirit ... to lend a hand to those who confront injustice as a result of a broken immigration system. — Steven Horsford

I had a fantasy as a child that I might be a writer someday. I always thought that meant you went to New York or Paris. But after that intense summer, I never thought that I wanted to live any place but Chicago. It also made me see what the stakes were in the civil rights movement. And it made me see what real hatred was like and the forms that it took. But it also made me understand how powerless ordinary people feel in their lives. — Sara Paretsky

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. — Glenn Beck

In my judgment, the slogan "black power" and what has been associated with it has set the civil rights movement back considerably in the United States over the period of the last several months. — Robert Kennedy

I loved going to the library. It was the first time I ever saw Black newspapers and magazines like JET, Ebony, the Baltimore Afro-American, or the Chicago Defender. And I'll never forget my librarian. — John Lewis

If Willie Nelson had been Rosa Parks, there never would have been a civil rights movement in this country, because he refuses to leave the back of the bus. — Kinky Friedman

Hollywood, Woodstock, nor the hippie culture was the source of power of the 1960's freedom movement. God was. — Glenn Beck

The sad truth is that the civil rights movement cannot be reborn until we identify the causes of black suffering, some of them self-inflicted. Why can't black leaders organize rallies around responsible sexuality, birth within marriage, parents reading to their children and students staying in school and doing homework? — Henry Louis Gates

The third Great Awakening is variously said to have started between the 1860s and 1890; it continued into the early 1900s and laid the ethical basis for the emancipation of women, the reforms of the New Deal and, later, the civil rights movement. — Charles Murray

Generally, the arguments for same-sex marriage go along these lines: 'I have a civil right.' What the homosexual movement wants to do is to hitch their agenda to the civil rights movement, but I point out that this is illegitimate for a number of reasons. Number one, no black person has ever left his black-ness or changed his black-ness, but plenty of people have come out of the homosexual movement. What we need to do is distinguish between race and behavior. — Erwin W. Lutzer

My parents met when they were graduate students at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. They were both active in the civil-rights movement. — Kamala Harris

Son draws comics of Mongolian invasions and the Civil Rights Movement - — Adam Johnson

Nina Simone was a gifted and prolific singer, songwriter and pianist who became a powerful presence in the civil rights movement and paid a professional price for it. Behind the scenes, she struggled in a fractious, sometimes violent relationship with her husband and manager and with mental health issues that strained other relationships, including with her only daughter. — Michel Martin

widespread. Some states go so far as to forcibly sterilize people with certain disabilities. Some prohibit marriage for the genetically disabled, for fear of procreating hereditary conditions like mine. Visibly disabled people are actually barred from appearing in public in cities such as Columbus, Ohio - Dad's hometown - until 1972, and Chicago until 1974, under what are collectively called the "ugly" laws because they target anyone perceived as unattractive, for being a disturbance of the peace. The movement to change all this and more is rising in discrete pockets all over, inspired by Black civil rights. Closer to — Ben Mattlin

Obama did not want to join a historically Christian black church in Chicago that took traditional Christian doctrines seriously. Rather, he sought out a liberal church that would help him advance his budding political career. Remnick notes that Obama could have joined "Reverend Arthur Brazier's enormous Pentecostal church on the South Side." But he didn't, and Brazier explained to Remnick why Obama didn't join his church: Reverend Wright and I are on different levels of Christian perspective. Reverend Wright is more into black liberation, he is more of a humanitarian type who sought to free African-Americans from plantation policies. My view was more on the spiritual side. I was more concerned, as I am today, with people accepting Jesus Christ. Winning souls for Christ. The civil-rights movement was an adjunct; as a Christian, you couldn't close your eyes to the injustice. But in my opinion the church was not established to do that. It was to win souls for Christ. — Phyllis Schlafly

America certainly has made extraordinary progress. The collective unconscious of the nation has certainly shifted as a result of the civil rights movement and the developments in the '70s and '80s. We have witnessed a great expansion of the black middle class. — Michael Eric Dyson

Black culture has contributed hugely to American society: The civil rights movement brought meaning to American notions of equality and freedom; black contributions to politics, science, music, and art have helped enrich all of us. To demean these accomplishments and contributions by listing rap among them is to demean black culture as a whole. — Ben Shapiro

Our history, America's history, has been so heavily edited. In history classes, we don't really go into full discussions about the past. People, struggles, and triumphs have been erased. As a result, we now have a generation, my generation, of people who are intelligent but ignorant of and blind to the truth. — Janelle Gray

[Ella Baker]'s second defining characteristic was her dislike of top-down leadership ... 'She felt leaders were not appointed but the rose up. Someone will rise. Someone will emerge'. It was an attitude Baker shared with some of the older women in the movement. — Gail Collins

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. — Scott Turow

I've always felt that homophobic attitudes and policies were unjust and unworthy of a free society and must be opposed by all Americans who believe in democracy. The civil rights movement thrives on unity and inclusion, not division and exclusion. My husband's struggle parallels that of the gay rights movement. — Coretta Scott King

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. — Ken Hutcherson

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. — Charlton Heston

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. — David Talbot

As important as the civil rights movement was, I think what will rise to the top is that we left Earth in that time. — Neil DeGrasse Tyson

The children of Birmingham did not really die in the State of Alabama, however, because Alabama is a state of mind, and in the minds of the [white] men who rule Alabama, those children had never lived [ ... ] their blood is on so many hands, that history will weep in the telling ... and it is not new blood. It is old, so very old. — Roger Ebert

How blind to believe the civil rights movement ever ended. The civil rights movement never ends, and it never will. It has been marching since the beginning of time. Where Martin Luther King started is where Gandhi left off, and where he started, Abe Lincoln left off, and before that Whitfield all the way back to Moses. God has not moved. We have. But it is never too late. We are not at the mercy of these events. We can alter the course of history. We can stand against the dangerous arc of this story. But we need people who are willing to speak truth. — Glenn Beck

There is no noise as powerful as the sound of the marching feet of a determined people. — Martin Luther King Jr. Papers Project

History reveals that the seeds of the new system of control were planted well before the end of the Civil Rights Movement. A new race-neutral language was developed for appealing to old racist sentiments, a language accompanied by a political movement that succeeded in putting the vast majority of blacks back in their place. Proponents of racial hierarchy found they could install a new racial caste system without violating law or the new limits of acceptable political discourse, by demanding "law and order" rather than "segregation forever. — Michelle Alexander

It really did take Billy Lucas's suicide to wake me up to, kind of, the damage of the success of the LGBT civil-rights movement - higher-profile LGBT people - has done to LGBT youth who are trapped out there in those shitholes. But I don't think we need Pride. I am still opposed, on philosophical grounds, to the flap of the rainbow windsock and the damage that does to us intellectually. — Dan Savage

He was leading those who risked their lives over that bridge in Selma, not Janice Joplin, Columbia University, or a labor union. It wasn't John Lennon that taught people about love and peaceful resistance - that job fell on the shoulders of a Jewish carpenter. — Glenn Beck

Out & Equal is about work. It's about authenticity. It's also about justice. Essentially it's about love, because when you get right down to it, the civil rights movement for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community is really about having the freedom to be who we are, and to love who we love. — Selisse Berry

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. — George Takei

The slogan of the American Civil Rights Movement was "We shall overcome!" Donald Trump's new campaign slogan is "We shall overcomb!" — Michael R. Burch

In every aspect and among almost every demographic, how American society digested and processed the long, dark chapter between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the civil rights movement has been delusion. — Douglas A. Blackmon

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. — Bayard Rustin

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. — James T. Walsh

Senator John Stennis:
The civil rights movement did more to free the white man that the black man ... It freed my soul. — Joe Biden

We have seen the civil rights movement insist on re-writing many of the textbooks in our universities and schools. The labor unions likewise insist that textbooks be fair to the viewpoints of organized labor. Other interested citizens groups have not hesitated to review, analyze and criticize textbooks and teaching materials. — Lewis F. Powell Jr.

The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass. — Henry Louis Gates

I watched as people went to the memorial reading the names. I started at the first entry from 1954. I read each one quietly but out loud to myself, like I'd done with the names of those in the museum. I felt somehow they were getting the message that their sacrifice was known and their voice was heard. — Janelle Gray

The canard about the Civil Rights Movement is embedded within a larger deception that progressives uniformly put forward. This deception is intended to defuse the sordid history of the Democratic Party's two-century involvement in a parade of evils from slavery to segregation to lynching to forced sterilization to support for fascism to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. All these horrors are the work of the Democratic Party. — Dinesh D'Souza

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

The civil-rights movement was completely impossible to achieve. But look at what ordinary people were able to do because they were willing to sacrifice their lives to stay with it. They didn't expect a political process to respond to them. They made the political process respond to them. To say "It's so bad I won't bother" is to give up on your children and give up on your future. — Marian Wright Edelman

Detroit was an exaggeration of what was going on across the country. You could see the divisions, even within the Civil Rights Movement of that period. At the same time that Martin Luther King was talking about his dream, Malcolm X gave his most famous address in Detroit during that same period, "The Message To The Grass Roots," dismissing the notion of integration. — David Maraniss

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. — Alice Walker

We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own. Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: to awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white, to talk like they are white, to think that they are white, which is to think that they are beyond the design flaws of humanity, has done to the world. — Ta-Nehisi Coates

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. — Janis Ian

There is an innocence or purity that we see in renewals and in the Mennonite church and a new an invigorated civil rights movement. — Shane Claiborne

Well, it's the last step of the civil rights movement: You know, wrap your hands around some money, right? — Russell Simmons

Judge Carter sat in stony silence, completely unmoved. At the end of the trial, he pronounced King guilty of conspiracy to violate the 1921 law and ordered him to pay a five-hundred-dollar fine or serve a year at hard labor. Like Judge Carter, the national newspaper and magazine reporters waiting outside for the ruling ignored the black women's testimonies that detailed decades of mistreatment and denied King's leadership in the boycott. Instead, the media turned King into an apostle of civil rights. — Danielle L. McGuire

According to court records, during the siege at Wounded Knee, more than two hundred and fifty thousand rounds were fired at our people by U.S. marshalls, FBI agents, the tribal police, the GOONs, and white vigilantes. These boys weren't kidding. And neither were we. — Leonard Peltier

The law and order perspective, first introduced during the peak of the Civil Rights Movement by rabid segregationists, had become nearly hegemonic two decades later. By — Michelle Alexander

You see, women have been essential to every great move of God. Yes, Moses led the Isaelites out of Egypt, but only after his mother risked her life to save him! Closer to our time, Clara Barton was instrumental in starting the Red Cross. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin put fire into people's heart to end slavery in the United States. Rosa Parks kicked the Civil Rights movement into gear with her quiet act of courage. Eunice Kennedy Shriver created the Special Olympics. Mother Teresa inspired the world by bringing love to countless thought unlovable. And millions of other women quietly change the world every day by bringing the love of God to those around them. — Stasi Eldredge

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

We knew no one man had killed the prophet. Rather, the combined weight of racism and an absence of moral courage had crushed him. A constitution ignored, laws denied, these were the weapons. America pulled the trigger. — Marita Golden

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. — Joan Halifax

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. — Radhanath Swami

There's no question that the black middle class has benefited greatly by the civil rights movement. But there is a large black underclass that does not have access to jobs. If there's no clear road to income and status except crime, we should expect social problems. You can't solve this problem without addressing the economic issues, and the same is true with gender. — Betty Friedan

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. — Bernice Johnson Reagon

And out in the rural, when Mrs. Laura McGhee--who if she thought it necessary, sat on the porch with her Winchester rifle--permitted movement workers to use her farm outside Greenwood for a rally, the sheriff came to warn her against holding it. She told him that *he* was on *her* property, that *he* was trespassing and hadn't ever offered any protection from the terrorists who kept threatening to shoot up her farms, and that he therefore had nothing to offer her now and had better leave, get off her land. And the sheriff left. — Charles E. Cobb Jr.

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. — Nate Parker

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. — Noam Chomsky

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. — Ann Coulter

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. — Otis Moss III

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. — Michael Moore

Mass incarceration - not attacks on affirmative action or lax civil rights enforcement - is the most damaging manifestation of the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement — Michelle Alexander

The Edmund Pettus Bridge - which in 2013 was declared a National Historic Landmark - isn't symbolic of the Civil War in a meaningful way. It is, however, the modern-day battlefield where the voting rights movement was born. — Douglas Brinkley

The whole reason for the success of Dr. King's civil-rights movement was that it was not a movement for itself. The civil-rights movement understood very clearly, and stated very beautifully, that it was a question of humanism, not a sectarian movement at all. — Christopher Hitchens

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. — Billy Graham

When I started graduate school I was interested in the culture of the Civil Rights Movement. — Bernice Johnson Reagon