Civil Rights Movement Quotes

It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s that Congress got serious about the assignment laid out in the post-Civil War amendments.

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.

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.

I think that for many of us, the years of the Civil Rights movements – Martin Luther King, Bobby Kennedy running for president in 1968 to end the war and so forth – these were defining moment in terms of trying to hold government accountable and have a level of responsibility and truth-telling.

Never forget that everything Hitler did in Germany was legal.

Covering the civil-rights movement was a mind- and eye-opener for me. Houston was a segregated society, as was Texas as a whole – some of it by law, a lot of it by fear and tradition. But there was no violence where I lived, and if there was hate, it was either concealed from me or I just didn’t recognize it.

My earliest memories are when my father was the attorney general at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. We would go to visit him at the Justice Department and take the tunnel over to the FBI building and watch the sharpshooters at practice.

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.

Newsman are the ones who – without them we don’t have a civil rights movement, we don’t have a women’s movement, we don’t have a Vietnam movement.

Yes, I think it’s really important to acknowledge that Dr. King, precisely at the moment of his assassination, was re-conceptualizing the civil rights movement and moving toward a sort of coalitional relationship with the trade union movement.

The so-called civil rights movement as it exists today is used as a Communist program for revolution in America.

No civil rights movement has gotten anywhere without the help of white liberals.

The Klan had used fear, intimidation and murder to brutally oppress over African-Americans who sought justice and equality and it sought to respond to the young workers of the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the same way.

Eventually [black men] are arrested, whether they’ve committed any serious crime or not, and branded criminals or felons for life. Upon release, they’re ushered into a parallel social universe in which the civil and human rights supposedly won during the Civil Rights Movement no longer apply to them.

The argument of those who are being criticized at any time, the civil rights movement forward, the anti-war movement forward, is, it’s always outside agitators doing it.

Food is an important lens onto the civil rights movement. One of the central issues of the movement was the right to eat in places that served the public. This battle led to the lunch counter sit-ins, which became embattled, contested places.

At the same time the folk boom was happening, the civil rights movement was happening, the anti-war movement was happening, the ban the bomb movement was happening, the environmental movement was happening. There was suddenly a generation ready to change the course of history.