Best 50 quotes in «civil rights movement quotes» category

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.

There is a source of power in each of us that we don't realize until we take responsibility.

But courage was growing in me too. Little by little it was getting harder and harder for me not to speak out.

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

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.

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.

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

For the rest of the afternoon, Miss Bloom smiled almost as bright as the big yellow sun shining through the front picture window. Her library was filled up with people who loved books.

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

I am tired of making history. I want to make progress.

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

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

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.

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.

I guess it's the curse of our generation, having to put aside our lives to do the right thing.

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

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

It may sound funny, but I love the South. I don't choose to live anywhere else. There's land here, where a man can raise cattle, and I'm going to do that someday. There are lakes where a man can sink a hook and fight bass. There is room here for my children to play, and grow, and become good citizens...

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

Many black women also kept guns within easy reach. But it is important to mention that women & their use of guns present the historian of the southern Freedom Movement with a particular problem. Many of the women from this era (like the men) have passed away & cannot be interviewed. And although a few of the men have written or been extensively interviewed about their role in self-defense, the women have publicly left little record & have generally been ignored in the discussion & debate over armed self-defense...For the most part, we do not know what many women who were active in the movement were thinking, or whether & how they organized for self-defense. Historians are therefore dependent on males for portrays & interpretations of women's thoughts & actions.

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

People believe what they want to believe. Even if it isn’t true.

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

I was so hungry to learn. My mother drilled this into me. When you read, she said, you know--and you can help yourself and others.

Mrs. (Fanie Lou) Hamer, like her mother, also kept weapons nearby in case she needed them: 'I keep a shotgun in every corner of my bedroom & the first cracker even looks like he wants to throw some dynamite on my porch won't write his mama again.

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

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.

On Thursday morning, May 2, 1963, nine-year-old Audrey Faye Hendricks woke up with freedom on her mind. But, before she could be free, there was something important she had to do. "I want to go to jail," Audrey had told her mother. Since Mr. and Mrs. Hendricks thought that was a good idea, they helped her get ready.

Racism is a disease of white people

She wore heavy sandals, with socks. No kid in the entire state of Mississippi wore black socks in the summer. Shoot, if I wasn't standing smack-dab in the middle of the library, I wouldn't be wearing shoes.

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

Rioting is not a movement. It is not an act of civil disobedience. I think it is a mistake for people to consider disorganized action, mayhem, and attacks on other people and property as an extension of any kind of movement. It is not. It is simply an explosion of emotion. That's all. There is nothing constructive about it. It is destructive.

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.

Simply put: because nonviolence worked so well as a tactic for effecting change and was demonstrably improving their lives, some black people chose to use weapons to defend the nonviolent Freedom Movement.

Sir, I know just how you feel.

The enemy was not the Klan but the inside-outside lock that racism and classism had on the minds of the people: It operated from the inside through self-hate and self-doubt, and from the outside through the police, carnivorous landlords, and the welfare system.

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

There was an aura about King that was unforgettable. I seem him now in my mind's eye: collected, peaceful, calm. He was in his element and totally in command of himself and the situation.

There is no noise as powerful as the sound of the marching feet of a determined people.

Tolerance of intolerance enables oppression.

This is how it works. Everything is connected. Every choice matters. Every person is vital, and valuable, and worthy of respect.

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.

The SNCC base of operation, at the corner of Jackson and High Streets, was in the heart of the black community in Montgomery. I don't remember too much else about the city, but I'll always remember that corner. There were hundreds of young people behind police barricades of some sort. Lots of college students, some white, from up North, and some local black folks and college students. The whole Selma-to-Montgomery push, and this ancillary thrust by SNCC in Montgomery, was because on the other side of that barricade there were white folks who had shown they would stop at nothing, including violence, to protect white supremacy.

This nation is still a place of cheap political leaders who build their careers on immoral compromises and ally themselves with open forms of political, economic, and social exploitation.

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.

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

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.

You don't have to stand up for your rights to get justice, sometimes you can sit for your rights like Rosa Parks.

When one person got involved, it took everybody else along. I went to jail first, but my entire family soon joined the Movement. One time, Faith & I ended up at home w all the babies from 2 households, because the mamas & the other older sisters were in jail. In the morning we had to plait everybody's hair & feed them--it was a mess! We had all the babies except Peaches Gaines, who was in jail with her mother & my mother. Peaches was jailed because she had not obeyed an officer. She was about 2. Her bond was set at, I believe, $125.00. --Joann Christian Mants

I just couldn't move. History had me glued to the seat.