Great Civil Rights Quotes

#1. 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

#2. When people discuss the 1960s and the great Civil Rights Era, they often speak in romantic terms as if there wasn't immense work put in, and as if there wasn't immense sacrifice that took place. But none of those battles were easily fought and won; there were sustained movements behind them.

Al Sharpton

#3. This must be a world of democracy and respect for human rights, a world freed from the horrors of poverty, hunger, deprivation and ignorance, relieved of the threat and the scourge of civil wars and external aggression and unburdened of the great tragedy of millions forced to become refugees.

Nelson Mandela

#4. Civil liberties are a great heritage for Americans. They are not rights that the government gives to the people, they are the rights that the people carved out for themselves when they created the government.

Edward Bennett Williams

#5. And to me, that's why the civil rights era is about the future, not about the past, because it's great lessons of how citizens can organize to call on the patriotic heritage of the country to tackle some of our most intractable problems and we need to do that again.

Taylor Branch

#6. You grow up with a heightened sense of the Civil Rights Movement, but I think it wasn't until I became of age that I really had a great appreciation for the struggle that took place.

Terri Sewell

#7. 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

#8. Judge Samuel Alito was born and raised in the great state of New Jersey. Our state has a legacy of producing outstanding jurists, most notably the late William J. Brennan, who ushered in our nation's recommitment to civil rights in the latter half of the 20th century.

Frank Lautenberg

#9. Mrs. Parks was a shy, soft spoken woman who was uncomfortable being revered as a symbol of the civil rights movement. She only hoped to inspire young people to achieve great things.

Jim Costa

#10. I think people instinctively know that their job is to give service and that they are part of a community. It had a great impact on me when my father walked the picket lines and I walked with him during the civil rights movement.

Russell Simmons

#11. My great grandmother threw herself in front of a bus. The police tried to say she was committed suicide but the family knew she was just trying to stop civil rights.

Anthony Jeselnik

#12. There's a great book about John Kennedy and his relationship to civil rights called 'The Bystander.' The title alone suggests that he did as little as possible, any minimal critical effort, to really facilitate civil rights in the White House.

Michael Eric Dyson

#13. Neither my great-grandfather an NAACP founder, my grandfather Dr. Martin Luther King, Sr. an NAACP leader, my father Rev. A. D. Williams King, nor my uncle Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. embraced the homosexual agenda that the current NAACP is attempting to label as a civil rights agenda,

Alveda King

#14. It was said by Abraham Lincoln that Ms. Stowe's novel, UNCLE TOM'S CABIN, started the great civil war, the it can be said with certainty that Ms. Brown's novel THE SOUTHERN CROSS reveals the untold story behind the Civil Rights Movement." John Jeter

Alabama Jane Brown

#15. You know, civil rights is great and everything, but a lot of people don't realize that plumbers in the South make less money than when they used to install separate drinking fountains.

Andy Kindler

#16. I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice.

Dan Wakefield

#17. I believe that education is the civil rights issue of our generation. And if you care about promoting opportunity and reducing inequality, the classroom is the place to start. Great teaching is about so much more than education; it is a daily fight for social justice.

Arne Duncan

#18. 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

#19. Books have played a role in almost every one of the world's great civil and human rights movements, but only because people who read them decided to act. Reading brings with it responsibility.

Will Schwalbe

#20. We start 'The Butler' in June and that's incredibly exciting for me because I get to work with the amazing Forest Whitaker again. It's a phenomenal script and a great, great role - I play his son. Oprah Winfrey is his wife and my mother. My character is a radical civil rights activist.

David Oyelowo

#21. We have got to protect privacy rights. We have got to protect our God-given, constitutionally protected civil liberties, and we are not doing that in the federal government. The Department of Homeland Security, as well as the TSA, is a great culprit in being a Gestapo-type organization.

Paul Broun

#22. Frank Johnson was recognized as one of the great federal judges of American history, I suppose. He was a law-and-order judge. He was a classical, I think, conservative. But he believed that civil rights provided in the Constitution applied to everybody.

Jeff Sessions

#23. The basic gamut of civil and political rights in terms of disappearances, detainees, people who are surrendered, what happened the missing. Any talk about allegations of war crimes. Those are the kind of thing that lead to a great deal of fear and uncertainty.

Paikiasothy Saravanamuttu

#24. I gained a great appreciation for what I would call the collective achievement of the country. I began thinking of America as a much more just and humane place than I would have thought if I'd been covering the civil rights struggle.

Charles Kuralt

#25. 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

#26. Each state, so that it does not abridge the great fundamental rights belonging, under the Constitution, to all citizens, may grant or withhold such civil rights as it pleases; all that is required is that, in this respect, its laws shall be impartial.

Lyman Trumbull

#27. Maya Angelou, the famous African American poet, historian, and civil rights activist who is hailed be many as one of the great voices of contemporary literature, believes a struggle only makes a person stronger.

Michael N. Castle