Best Civil Rights Movement Quotes | Short & Famous Sayings Page 3

“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.”

Writing Trying Kind Country Song Struggle Successful Rights Movement Workers Civil Rights Our Country Progressive Womens Rights Civil Rights Movement Soundtracks Barricades Workers Rights

Author:Tom Morello

“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.”

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Author:Yaya DaCosta

“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.”

“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.”

Black White Rights Movement Folks Civil Rights Frightened Civil Rights Movement Mississippi

Author:Dick Gregory

“That's what he was saying, the civil rights movement - judge me for my character, not how black my skin is, not how yellow my skin is, how short I am, how tall or fat or thin; It's by my character.”

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Author:Pam Grier

“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.”

“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.”

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Author:Jim Brown

“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.”

Thinking Kind Chance Taken Rights Movement Pure Connections Slavery Civil Rights African American Formal Civil Rights Movement

Author:Herbie Hancock

“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.”

“The Civil Rights movement should thank God for Bull Connor. He's helped it as much as Abraham Lincoln.”

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Author:John F. Kennedy

“There are many persons ready to do what is right because in their hearts they know it is right. But they hesitate, waiting for theother fellow to make the first move--and he, in turn, waits for you. The minute a person whose word means a great deal dares to take the open- hearted and courageous way, many others follow. Not everyone can be turned aside from meanness and hatred, but the great majority of Americans is heading in that direction. I have a great belief in the future of my people and my country.”

Source: My Lord, what a Morning: An Autobiography

“...Negroes must concern themselves with every single means of struggle: legal, illegal, passive, active, violent and non- violent.... They must harass, debate, petition, boycott, sing hymns, pray on steps--and shoot from their windows when the racists come cruising through their communities.... The acceptance of our condition is the only form of extremism which discredits us before our children [ellipses in source].”

“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.”

“A lot of people criticized me for speaking out, not long ago, about gay marriage. I could not remain silent any longer. It's the civil rights of our day. It's the issue of our day.”

“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.”

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Book:Christopher Hitchens: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

Source: Christopher Hitchens: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations

“I've never been afraid to step out and to reach out and to move out in order to make things happen.”

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Author:Victoria Gray Adams

“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.”

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Author:Jehane Noujaim

“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.”

“You could not be in the civil rights movement without having an appreciation for everybody's rights. That these rights are not divisible - not something men have and women don't and so on.”

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Author:Julian Bond

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

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Author:Neil deGrasse Tyson

“One of the things I know about my family, my generation, and my ethic background is that we put in work and I'm not just talking about just to eat. You have to think about the civil rights movement, they were putting in work; marching, walking miles and miles, sacrificing, getting on the bus, feeding one another, they had schools, voter registration, they were working! They were hard workers so my advice is to work.”

“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.”

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Author:Charlton Heston

“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.”

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Author:Otis Moss III

“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.”

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Author:Saul Williams

“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.”

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Author:Angela Davis

“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.”

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Author:Bob Edwards

“Many heroic things happened during slavery. And remember that there was a national movement away from it even at the time. The era of Reconstruction and then the subsequent dismantling of Reconstruction sent us in a tailspin. Then we had the Civil Rights movement. Now we have our first non-white president. We have a pattern of moving apart and then coming back together throughout the history of this country. Each time, we come closer.”

“The elites hate to acknowledge it, but when large numbers of ordinary people are moved to action, it changes the narrow political world where the elites call the shots. Inside accounts reveal the extent to which Johnson and Nixon's conduct of the Vietnam War was constrained by the huge anti-war movement. It was the civil rights movement, not compelling arguments, that convinced members of Congress to end legal racial discrimination.”

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Author:Dean Baker

“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.”

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Author:Ayaan Hirsi Ali

“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.”

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Author:Norman Jewison

“The civil rights movement didn't deal with the issue of political disenfranchisement in the Northern cities. It didn't deal with the issues that were happening in places like Detroit, where there was a deep process of deindustrialization going on. So you have this response of angry young people, with a war going on in Vietnam, a poverty program that was insufficient, and police brutality. All these things gave rise to the black power movement. The black power movement was not a separation from the civil rights movement, but a continuation of this whole process of democratization.”

“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.”

“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.”

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Book:Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

Source: Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II

“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.”

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Author:Bell Hooks

“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.”

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Author:Peter Beinart

“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.”

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Author:Bernie Sanders

“The slogan of the American Civil Rights Movement was "We shall overcome!" Donald Trump's new campaign slogan is "We shall overcomb!"”

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Author:Michael R. Burch

“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.”

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Author:Dan Savage

“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.”

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Author:Noam Chomsky

“The sad and tragic fact is that the civil rights movement, despite its honorable and courageous past, has over the years degenerated into a demagogic hustle, promoting the mindless racism they once fought against.”

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Author:Thomas Sowell

“I think one of the tragedies of the civil rights movement was because the civil rights movement became so court-focused, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing, and activities on the ground, that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power throughout which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways, we still suffer from that.”

“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.”

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Author:Ann Coulter

“When I speak to students about the Civil Rights Movement, I say that it is impossible to stop a determined movement that is captivating the American consciousness. I think the candidacy of Sen. Obama represents the beginning of a new movement in American political history that began in the hearts and minds of the people of this nation. And I want to be on the side of the people, on the side of the spirit of history.”

“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.”

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Author:Stanley Nelson Jr.

“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.”

“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.”

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Author:Luis Gutierrez

“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.”

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Author:David Maraniss

“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.”

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Author:David Maraniss

“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.”

“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.”

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Author:Killer Mike

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Civil Rights Movement Quotes