Civil Rights Quotes - Page 2

I feel that for white America to understand the significance of the problem of the Negro will take a bigger and tougher America than any we have yet known. I feel that America's past is too shallow, her national character too superficially optimistic, her very morality too suffused with color hate for her to accomplish so vast and complex a task. Culturally the Negro represents a paradox: Though he is an organic part of the nation, he is excluded by the ride and direction of American culture. Frankly, it is felt to be right to exclude him, and it if felt to be wrong to admit him freely. Therefore if, within the confines of its present culture, the nation ever seeks to purge itself of its color hate, it will find itself at war with itself, convulsed by a spasm of emotional and moral confusion. If the nation ever finds itself examining its real relation to the Negro, it will find itself doing infinitely more than that; for the anti-Negro attitude of whites represents but a tiny part - though a symbolically significant one - of the moral attitude of the nation. Our too-young and too-new America, lusty because it is lonely, aggressive because it is afraid, insists upon seeing the world in terms of good and bad, the holy and the evil, the high and the low, the white and the black; our America is frightened of fact, of history, of processes, of necessity. It hugs the easy way of damning those whom it cannot understand, of excluding those who look different, and it salves its conscience with a self-draped cloak of righteousness. Am I damning my native land? No; for I, too, share these faults of character! And I really do not think that America, adolescent and cocksure, a stranger to suffering and travail, an enemy of passion and sacrifice, is ready to probe into its most fundamental beliefs.

Richard Wright

What if racism is so perfect, it made you believe the boycotting and peaceful protests of the civil rights movement actually changed policies, but in actuality policies were gonna change anyway."Hell, let them sit whereever they want on the bus. Just don't sit with them. Let them into our schools, the teachers will still teach from a eurocentric curriculum anyway. Let them eat with us, they'll need the energy and strength to build our homes."Racism is a perfect system with an impenetrable barrier.

Darnell Lamont Walker

People often call fighting racism being 'PC' when they don't want to confront their own prejudice

DaShanne Stokes

Tolerance of intolerance enables oppression.

DaShanne Stokes

Reducing a group to a slur or stereotype reduces us all.

DaShanne Stokes

It's illegal to deny people their records due to race or gender. Adoptees deserve the same rights and protections.

DaShanne Stokes

Privilege is when you can afford to sit back and watch as others' rights are trampled upon.

DaShanne Stokes

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

DaShanne Stokes

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

DaShanne Stokes

The minute we look away, the minute we stop fighting back, that's the minute bigotry wins.

DaShanne Stokes

Bigotry is based on deception, of oneself and of others.

DaShanne Stokes

It speaks volumes when people who are discriminated against go on to discriminate against others.

DaShanne Stokes

Standing against discrimination for some while supporting discrimination against others hurts us all.

DaShanne Stokes

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

...the majority in a democracy has no more right to tyrannize over a minority than, under a different system, the latter would to oppress the former.

Theodore Roosevelt

Sixty millions of whites are in no danger from the presence here of eight millions of blacks. The destinies of the two races, in this country, are indissolubly linked together, and the interests of both require that the common government of all shall not permit the seeds of race hate to be planted under the sanction of law.

John Marshall Harlan

The sure guaranty of the peace and security of each race is the clear, distinct, unconditional recognition by our governments, national and state, of every right that inheres in civil freedom, and of the equality before the law of all citizens of the United States, without regard to race. State enactments regulating the enjoyment of civil rights upon the basis of race, and cunningly devised to defeat legitimate results of the war, under the pretense of recognizing equality of rights, can have no other result than to render permanent peace impossible, and to keep alive a conflict of races, the continuance of which must do harm to all concerned.

John Marshall Harlan

Plus I have no doubt that their garden is also where my grandparents dreamed—for a better life of equality for their grandchildren and future generations. As people rooted in their faith, they probably did a lot of praying here as well, that God would deliver us all to prosperity and peace beyond this plot of land.

Deborah L. Parker

Bigotry and sexism destroy the unity needed for a nation to live.

DaShanne Stokes

Dr. King's policy was that nonviolence would achieve the gains for black people in the United States. His major assumption was that if you are nonviolent, if you suffer, your opponent will see your suffering and will be moved to change his heart. That's very good. He only made one fallacious assumption: In order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience. The United States has none.

Stokely Carmichael

A man with a rifle or a club can only be stopped by a person who defends himself with a rifle or a club. That's equality. If the United States government doesn't want you and me to have rifles, then take the rifles away from those racists. If they don't want you and me to use clubs, take the clubs away from the racists. If they don't want you and me to get violent, then stop the racists from being violent. Don't teach us non-violence!!!

Malcolm X

A Black church that isn't inherently revolutionary is irrelevant.

Darnell Lamont Walker

[Martin Luther King] said that little black boys and little black girls would be able to join hands with little white boys and little white girls as sisters and brothers. Then he reminded both those spectators before him and all Americans that this hope of his, this faith, was rooted in the promise of America.

Keith Ellison

I consider myself an American African because we did not come by choice.

Alafia Stewart

I am groping about through this American forest of prejudice and proscription, determined to find some form of civilization where all men will be accepted for what they are worth.

P.B.S. Pinchback

But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man, and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guarantied by the supreme law of the land are involved.

John Marshall Harlan

But here in my hometown, history was like a fine dust that settled out on everything. There was nothing to counter it. The culture had been hardened by a religion suspect of joy, yet fascinated by sin. Its moral acceptance of slavery eroded compassion. And gentility became a necessary pretense to cover the resentment created long ago when the North’s industrial prestige trumped the agrarian South. It was not an easy place to feel lighthearted or triumphant. Nor was it an easy place to remember the beauty of wonder and awe.

Christina Carson

Be wary of those propagating too much about liberty, ideology, and civility; they just might be oppressors in the making.

Aniruddha Sastikar

We shall find that every effort to realize equality necessitates a sacrifice of liberty.

William Graham Sumner

History could not be any clearer: Rights given by fad and fashion are just as easily taken away. The Constitution matters.

A.E. Samaan

You can either have individual liberty, or dependence on the government. One is designed to undo the other.

A.E. Samaan

The "right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness" begins with "life", and "life" begins at conception.

A.E. Samaan

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

Herb Ritts

How did I make a living? I haven't. I have eked out an existence." - Ella Baker

Gail Collins

Trying to erase, hide, discredit, degrade, and suppress a writer's work, merit, voice, and influence―is unconstitutional. Censorship only exists to protect corruption.

Suzy Kassem

In our glorious fight for civil rights, we must guard against being fooled by false slogans, such as 'right-to-work.' It provides no 'rights' and no 'works.' Its purpose is to destroy labor unions and the freedom of collective bargaining…. We demand this fraud be stopped.

Martin Luther King Jr.

The missing link between humans and apes? It's certainly those brutes who haven't yet learned to respect privacy.

Raheel Farooq

We were to write a short essay on one of the works we read in the course and relate it to our lives. I chose the "Allegory of the Cave" in Plato's Republic. I compared my childhood of growing up in a family of migrant workers with the prisoners who were in a dark cave chained to the floor and facing a blank wall. I wrote that, like the captives, my family and other migrant workers were shackled to the fields day after day, seven days a week, week after week, being paid very little and living in tents or old garages that had dirt floors, no indoor plumbing, no electricity. I described how the daily struggle to simply put food on our tables kept us from breaking the shackles, from turning our lives around. I explained that faith and hope for a better life kept us going. I identified with the prisoner who managed to escape and with his sense of obligation to return to the cave and help others break free.

Francisco Jiménez

To my Black brothers and sisters, choose faith. As difficult as it is, choose faith—the kind of faith that we know without works is dead. The faith that raises awareness, educates the community, advocates, cares for the widows and feeds the orphans. Choose the faith that is compelled to action, but not controlled my anger.

Andrena Sawyer

Righteous indignation calls sin what it is. Bigotry is sin. Racism is sin. Oppression is sin. Control by fear is sin. Violence is sin. The quicker we can all admit that, the quicker the healing will begin.

Andrena Sawyer

In not a single one of these little campaigns was I victorious. In other words, in each case, I personally failed, but I have lived to see the thesis upon which I was operating vindicated. And what I very often say is that I’ve lived to see my lost causes found.

Pauli Murray

People often call fighting discrimination being 'PC' because they don't want their own unearned privileges challenged.

DaShanne Stokes

Political correctness’ is a label the privileged often use to distract from their privilege and hate.

DaShanne Stokes

The price of conviction has never been cheap, but it will always be worth it.

Andrena Sawyer

Wherever the real power in a Government lies, there is the danger of oppression. In our Governments the real power lies in the majority of the Community, and the invasion of private rights is chiefly to be apprehended, not from acts of Government contrary to the sense of its constituents, but from acts in which the Government is the mere instrument of the major number of the constituents.

James Madison

These examples and many others demonstrate an alarming trend whereby the privacy and dignity of our citizens is being whittled away by sometimes imperceptible steps. Taken individually, each step may be of little consequence. But when viewed as a whole, there begins to emerge a society quite unlike any we have seen -- a society in which government may intrude into the secret regions of man's life at

William O. Douglas

From time to time our national history has been marred by forgetfulness of the Jeffersonian principle that restraint is at the heart of liberty. In 1789 the Federalists adopted Alien and Sedition Acts in a shabby political effort to isolate the Republic from the world and to punish political criticism as seditious libel. In 1865 the Radical Republicans sought to snare private conscience in a web of oaths and affirmations of loyalty. Spokesmen for the South did service for the Nation in resisting the petty tyranny of distrustful vengeance. In the 1920's the Attorney General of the United States degraded his office by hunting political radicals as if they were Salem witches. The Nation's only gain from his efforts were the classic dissents of Holmes and Brandeis.In our own times, the old blunt instruments have again been put to work. The States have followed in the footsteps of the Federalists and have put Alien and Sedition Acts upon their statute books. An epidemic of loyalty oaths has spread across the Nation until no town or village seems to feel secure until its servants have purged themselves of all suspicion of non-conformity by swearing to their political cleanliness.Those who love the twilight speak as if public education must be training in conformity, and government support of science be public aid of caution.We have also seen a sharpening and refinement of abusive power. The legislative investigation, designed and often exercised for the achievement of high ends, has too frequently been used by the Nation and the States as a means for effecting the disgrace and degradation of private persons. Unscrupulous demagogues have used the power to investigate as tyrants of an earlier day used the bill of attainder.The architects of fear have converted a wholesome law against conspiracy into an instrument for making association a crime. Pretending to fear government they have asked government to outlaw private protest. They glorify "togetherness" when it is theirs, and call it conspiracy when it is that of others.In listing these abuses I do not mean to condemn our central effort to protect the Nation's security. The dangers that surround us have been very great, and many of our measures of vigilance have ample justification. Yet there are few among us who do not share a portion of the blame for not recognizing soon enough the dark tendency towards excess of caution.

John F Kennedy

Principles are meant to serve people, not people serving to uphold the principle, while harming the people.

Shannon L. Alder

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

United Nations

Only until all human beings begin to recognize themselves as human beings will prejudice be gone forever. People ask me what race I am, but there is no such thing as race. I just answer: "I’m a member of the human race.

Amelia Boynton Robinson

Silence is for fools. Communication is for leaders. Justice is for those brave enough to not stand another moment dealing with people that feel the solution to any problem is through cold indifference because of their lack of courage and insecurities.

Shannon L. Alder

Adoptees deserve open records because deception and partial truths do not set us free.

DaShanne Stokes

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

DaShanne Stokes

Racism is dead only to those who've closed their eyes and ears to the whole world around them.

DaShanne Stokes

Right isn't always legal.

J.S.B. Morse

It's terrifying to think you could become the next statistic.

DaShanne Stokes

Love is a better way.

John Lewis

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

DaShanne Stokes

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

DaShanne Stokes

Although the principle of equality has always been self-evident, it has never been self-executing.

Barack Obama

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Civil Rights Quotes - Page 2

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