Quotes About American Civil Rights

#1. Respectfully, the civil rights movement for people with disabilities is modeled on the African American civil rights movement. I'm old enough to remember 1964. I was a junior in high school.

Robert David Hall

#2. Culture is about humanizing people. You look at the African-American civil rights movement, you look at the LGBT rights movement - the culture changed before the politics did.

Jose Antonio Vargas

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

Michael R. Burch

#4. 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

#5. Unlike mainstream civil rights groups, which merely sought integration of blacks into the existing order, SNCC sought structural changes in American society itself,

Julian Bond

#6. I have a long history in fighting for civil rights. I understand that many people in the African-American community may not understand that.

Bernie Sanders

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

A.E. Samaan

#8. Everything African-Americans - every freedom they have obtained - came from Republicans, not Democrats. All the way back to the Emancipation Proclamation, to the Civil Rights movement. Civil Rights legislation was passed by a Republican Congress.

Rafael Cruz

#9. 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

#10. The [Apache] tribe was under siege by government agents, who had jailed some of the medicine men for practicing their rituals. Freedom of religion was cherished as a sacrosanct American right -- everywhere, that is, but on the archipelago of Indian life.

Timothy Egan

#11. 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

#12. 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.

Bruce L. Shelley

#13. The Civil Rights for Musicians Act is about economic justice for African American artists. It's about what's right. And it's about time.

Dionne Warwick

#14. The South resented giving the Afro-American his freedom, the ballot box and the Civil Rights Law.

Ida B. Wells

#15. 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

#16. If the events of September 11, 2001, have proven anything, it's that the terrorists can attack us, but they can't take away what makes us American
our freedom, our liberty, our civil rights. No, only Attorney General John Ashcroft can do that.

Jon Stewart

#17. 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

#18. If I were an Arab-American, I would insist on being profiled. This is not the time for civil rights. There are larger issues for Americans.

Jack Nicholson

#19. There's good reason to be excited. You have the first woman running who is qualified, and a very attractive African-American who has demonstrated crossover appeal. I got involved in politics 40 years ago during the civil rights movement, so yes, it's an exciting thing.

Joe Biden

#20. Mrs. Parks' act of brave defiance rocked the foundation of American society and inspired generations of civil rights leaders and created a sense of hope for every American facing legal discrimination in this country.

Kendrick Meek

#21. Forgiveness is a big part of - especially post-civil rights movement - is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasn't raised within the Christian church; I wasn't raised within any church.

Ta-Nehisi Coates

#22. The period that I would anoint as the golden era in American journalism was from the mid 1950s to the mid 1970s. It had three separate major strands: the Civil Rights struggle over integration of schools and public facilities in the South; the Vietnam War; and Watergate.

Anonymous

#23. 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

#24. Every advance in this half-century-Social Security, civil rights, Medicare, aid to education, one after another-came with the support and leadership of American Labor.

Jimmy Carter

#25. 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

#26. 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

#27. Slavery is a memory of something we cannot remember, and yet we cannot forget.

Bill T. Jones

#28. I don't call myself a white supremacist. I'm a civil rights activist concerned about European-American rights.

David Duke

#29. One in three young African American men is currently under the control of the criminal justice system - in prison, in jail, on probation, or on parole - yet mass incarceration tends to be categorized as a criminal justice issue as opposed to a racial justice or civil rights issue (or crisis)

Michelle Alexander

#30. The arc of American history almost inevitably moves toward freedom. Whether it's Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, the expansion of women's rights or, now, gay rights, I think there is an almost-inevitable march toward greater civil liberties.

James McGreevey

#31. Being an American is about having the right to be who you are. Sometimes that doesn't happen.

Herb Ritts

#32. 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

#33. Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement.

Michael Eric Dyson

#34. According to court records, during the siege at Wounded Knee, more than two hundred and fifty thousand rounds were fired at our people by U.S. marshalls, FBI agents, the tribal police, the GOONs, and white vigilantes. These boys weren't kidding. And neither were we.

Leonard Peltier

#35. We want to make certain that every American who stood in silent tribute to Rosa Parks hopes that the Sepreme Court Judge will break silence and speak out clearly for the civil rights that define our unity as a nation.

Dick Durbin

#36. While American intellectual property deserves protection, that protection must be won and defended in a manner that does not stifle innovation, erode due process under the law, and weaken the protection of political and civil rights on the Internet.

Rebecca MacKinnon

#37. Preferential affirmative action patronizes American blacks, women, and others by presuming that they cannot succeed on their own. Preferential affirmative action does not advance civil rights in this country.

Alan Keyes

#38. 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

#39. The busybodies have begun to infect American society with a nasty intolerance - a zeal to police the private lives of others and hammer them into standard forms - A Nation of Finger Pointers.

Lance Morrow