Civil Rights Movement Quotes

The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.

~ Timothy B. Tyson

Prejudice plunges you into a world of fear and hate. That's no way to live.

~ Dashanne Stokes

It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.

~ Tariq Ali

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

~ Joe Biden

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

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

Back then, Black churches were a small piece of peace. Church was a world where, even with its imperfections, the offer of equality and common humanity was the sustenance needed to make it through the rest of the week in a society that deemed them less than human.

~ Janelle Gray

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream was a manifestation of hope that humanity might one day get out of its own way by finding the courage to realize that love and nonviolence are not indicators of weakness but gifts of significant strength.

~ Aberjhani

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 question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.

~ Ralph Ellison

Bigotry lives not just in our words, but in our actions, thoughts, and institutions.

~ Dashanne Stokes

The greatest evil in our country today is...ignorance...We need to be taught to study rather than to believe.

~ Septima Poinsette Clark

If you'd combat bigotry, use honest language and call things out for what they really are.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Calling for an end to hate shouldn't be treated as a punishable offense.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Privilege is when you contribute to the oppression of others and then claim that you are the one being discriminated against.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Silence is for fools. Communication is for leaders. Justice is for those brave enough to not stand another moment dealing with people that feel the solution to any problem is through cold indifference because of their lack of courage and insecurities.

~ Shannon L. Alder

The evolution of national unity and equal rights is all about what America represents as a nation today: a manifestation of the historical episodes of Jefferson and Henry as well as the Civil War, the Women’s Suffrage movement, and the Civil Rights struggles.

~ Patrick Mendis

A freedom given up is not so easily regained.

~ Rivera Sun

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

We can’t answer King’s assassination with violence. That would be the worst tribute we could pay him.

~ Sammy Davis Jr.

Violence never really deals with the basic evil of the situation. Violence may murder the murderer, but it doesn’t murder murder. Violence may murder the liar, but it doesn’t murder lie; it doesn’t establish truth. Violence may even murder the dishonest man, but it doesn’t murder dishonesty. Violence may go to the point of murdering the hater, but it doesn’t murder hate. It may increase hate. It is always a descending spiral leading nowhere. This is the ultimate weakness of violence: It multiplies evil and violence in the universe. It doesn’t solve any problems.

~ Martin Luther King Jr.

It speaks volumes when people who are discriminated against go on to discriminate against others.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Standing against discrimination for some while supporting discrimination against others hurts us all.

~ Dashanne Stokes

The minute we look away, the minute we stop fighting back, that's the minute bigotry wins.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Bigotry is based on deception, of oneself and of others.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Tolerance of intolerance enables oppression.

~ Dashanne Stokes

You're not under attack when others gain rights and privileges you've always had.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Never be content to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon. Your rights could be next.

~ Dashanne Stokes

Segregation in the American South was bankrolled by the wealthy eugenicist from the Northeast, Wickliffe Draper.

~ A.e. Samaan

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

And all Negroes at some period of their lives there is that yearning for a sense of group unity that is the yearning of men for a flag: for a unity that cannot be compromised, that cannot be bought; that is conscious of itself, of its strength, that is militant.

~ Ralph Ellison

The rhetoric of ‘law and order’ was first mobilized in the late 1950s as Southern governors and law enforcement officials attempted to generate and mobilize white opposition to the Civil Rights Movement. In the years following Brown v. Board of Education, civil rights activists used direct-action tactics in an effort to force reluctant Southern States to desegregate public facilities. Southern governors and law enforcement officials often characterized these tactics as criminal and argued that the rise of the Civil Rights Movement was indicative of a breakdown of law and order. Support of civil rights legislation was derided by Southern conservatives as merely ‘rewarding lawbreakers.’ For more than a decade – from the mid 1950s until the late 1960s – conservatives systematically and strategically linked opposition to civil rights legislation to calls for law and order, arguing that Martin Luther King Jr.’s philosophy of civil disobedience was a leading cause of crime.

~ Michelle Alexander

But what's braver?' Emmanuel said. 'Naming the bigots and possibly being killed for it? Or living in silence in order to protect yourself and those you love?' I think bravery had more to do with making the choice and less to do with the choice it self. In that situation, bravery was both living and dying.

~ Janelle Gray

I had never read a book written by an African-American. I didn't know that black people could write books. I didn't know that blacks had done any great things. I was always conscious of my inferiority and I always remembered my place - until the Civil Rights Movement came to the town where I was born and grew up.

~ Endesha Ida Mae Holland

[O]ur revolt was as much against the traditional black leadership structure as it was against segregation and discrimination.

~ John Lewis

For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black.

~ Christopher Hitchens

Only by acknowledging the full extent of slavery's full grip on U.S. Society - its intimate connections to present day wealth and power, the depth of its injury to black Americans, the shocking nearness in time of its true end - can we reconcile the paradoxes of current American life.

~ Douglas A. Blackmon

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

Sit on the truth too long and you mash the life right out of it.

~ Margaret Mcmullan