Top 64 Black Civil Rights Quotes
#1. 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.
E.W. Jackson
#2. And although black civil rights leaders like to point to a supposedly racist criminal justice system to explain why our prisons house so many black men, it's been obvious for decades that the real culprit is black behavior - behavior too often celebrated in black culture.
Jason L. Riley
#3. 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 The donation was withdrawn.
Noreena Hertz
#4. 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.
Pete Du Pont
#5. 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
#6. 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.
Marian Wright Edelman
#7. [O]ur revolt was as much against the traditional black leadership structure as it was against segregation and discrimination.
John Lewis
#8. Yet civil rights issues are very much on the front burner in South Carolina between the Black Lives Matter movement and police shootings.
Ari Shapiro
#9. I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.
Stokely Carmichael
#10. In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There's so much more to the story.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
#11. 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.
Nicholas D. Kristof
#12. every time this happens
I see my father
my brother
my would be son
I see myself
stop killing us
R H Sin
#13. 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.
Pam Grier
#14. The black revolt is as palpable in letters as it is in the streets.
Hoyt W. Fuller
#15. 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.
George Clooney
#16. 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.
Niger Innis
#17. The rise of the antiwar and civil rights movements, along with the emergence of radical groups such as the Black Panthers, the Black Liberation Army, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and the American Indian movement, saw a return to systematized abuse within the prison system.
Chris Hedges
#18. 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.
Charles E. Cobb
#19. 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.
Geoffrey Canada
#20. 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.
Bernie Sanders
#21. Does anyone in this room have it?"
"No, Chris, no one here has it."
"How do you know?"
"Because the mark was dark skin. Negroes are the descendants of Cain."
I didn't have my civil-rights sensibilities yet, but I was starting to get a bad feeling about God ...
Chris Crutcher
#23. 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.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
#24. Sidney Poitier became a star in part by helping black and white Americans negotiate their new relationship in the post-Civil Rights era.
Wesley Morris
#25. 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
#26. 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
#27. 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.
Henry Hampton
#28. 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.
James Earl Jones
#29. But despite the scarcity of confrontation with whites in our neighborhood, race and racism permeated every aspect of our lives. Our parents taught us that in order to succeed, we 'had to be twice as good as white folks.' We were constantly being prepared to enter a world dominated by whites.
Junius Williams
#30. I had no way of predicting that Selma to Montgomery was indeed to be the last great civil rights march of the era, and that everything afterward would indeed by 'post-civil rights.
Junius Williams
#31. In the years since his murder, we have transformed King into a kind of innocuous black Santa Claus.
Timothy B. Tyson
#32. Senator John Stennis:
The civil rights movement did more to free the white man that the black man ... It freed my soul.
Joe Biden
#33. How is the black man going to get 'civil rights' before he first wins his human rights?
Malcolm X
#34. For a black male, the sound of the blues is pre-Civil Rights. It's oppression.
Gary Clark Jr.
#35. 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.
Dick Gregory
#36. 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.
Jerry Falwell
#37. The bed sheet brigade is bad enough, but the real threat to Americans and human rights today is the plain clothes Klux in the halls of government and certain black-robed Klux on court benches.
Stetson Kennedy
#38. 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.
Rita Dove
#39. 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.
Henry Louis Gates
#40. If Barack Obama now, or some black person in the future, should become president, neither Jesse Jackson nor Al Sharpton would be out of a job. A black president can't end black misery; a black president can't be a civil rights leader or primarily a crusader for racial justice.
Michael Eric Dyson
#41. 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?
Benjamin Harrison
#42. Knocking on doors wasn't working. We had to try something else. Remember the kids whose natural curiosity brought them into our little office on the corner? We set up a Freedom School that was fashioned after the SNCC Freedom Schools in Mississippi and other places.
Junius Williams
#43. I'm hurting because the color of my skin makes me perfect for their target practice.
R H Sin
#44. 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
#46. 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
#47. 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.
Lynn Samuels
#48. 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.
Junius Williams
#49. 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.
Angela Davis
#50. We've got to face the fact that some people say you fight fire best with fire, but we say you put fire out best with water. We say you don't fight racism with racism. We're gonna fight racism with solidarity.
Fred Hampton
#51. 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
#52. I am an educated black woman in a time when educated black people will be called upon to risk everything for the rights of black people everywhere.
Allan Dare Pearce
#53. It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.
Elijah Cummings
#55. The fact that women are very young in obtaining their civil rights and African-Americans are young in obtaining their civil rights, I think it's about time that we extend that to all Americans, whether straight, gay, purple, green, black, brown.
Octavia Spencer
#56. 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
#57. 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.
Henry Rollins
#58. So that the failures to pass a civil rights bill isn't because of Black Power, isn't because of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; it's not because of the rebellions that are occurring in the major cities.
Stokely Carmichael
#59. 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.
Augusta Scattergood
#60. 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
#61. 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.
Dick Gregory
#62. 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.
John Henrik Clarke
#63. Black power showed up in different ways, depending on the goals of the group.
Junius Williams
#64. 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.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
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