Civil Rights Movement Quotes

“The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.”
― Tariq Ali, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad

“Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black.”
― Christopher Hitchens

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

“If you believe in a cause, be willing to stand up for that cause with a million people or by yourself.”
― Otis S. Johnson, FROM "N" WORD TO MR. MAYOR

“The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“A jail within a jail. In those long hours, he struggled over Reverend King's equation. "Throw us in jail and we will love you ... But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win our freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory." No he could not make that leap to love. He understood neither the impulse of the proposition nor the will to execute it.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“And all Negroes at some period of their lives there is that yearning for a sense of group unity that is the yearning of men for a flag: for a unity that cannot be compromised, that cannot be bought; that is conscious of itself, of its strength, that is militant.”
― Ralph Ellison

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Often ignored by civil rights historians, a number of campaigns led to trials and even convictions throughout the South. These cases, many virtually unknown, broke with Southern tradition and fractured the philosophical and political foundations of white supremacy by challenging the relationship between sexual domination and racial equality.”
― Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

“Senator John Stennis:
The civil rights movement did more to free the white man that the black man. ... It freed my soul.”
― Joe Biden, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics

“A final challenge that we face as a result of our great dilemma is to be ever mindful of enlarging the whole society, and giving it a new sense of values as we seek to solve our particular problem. As we work to get rid of the economic strangulation that we face as a result of poverty, we must not overlook the fact that millions of Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Indians and Appalachian whites are also poverty-stricken. Any serious war against poverty must of necessity include them. As we work to end the educational stagnation that we face as a result of inadequate segregated schools, we must not be unmindful of the fact, as Dr. James Conant has said, the whole public school system is using nineteenth-century educational methods in conditions of twentieth-century urbanization, and that quality education must be enlarged for all children. By and large, the civil rights movement has followed this course, and in so doing has contributed infinitely more to the nation than the eradication of racial injustice. In winning rights for ourselves we have produced substantial benefits for the whole nation.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages. It is a social force any group can utilize by accumulating its elements in a planned, deliberate campaign to organize it under its own control.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“Earth Belongs to The Natives (Sonnet 2401)

We cannot abolish systemic persecution
without dismantling systemic privilege.
You cannot wipe the slate clean, but you can
take the responsibility and stand to heal.

Colonizers are the second class citizens,
every land first belongs to the indigenous.
Landback is the mother of all movements,
it contains the plight of all First Humans.

Women are indigenous to their own body,
Palestinians are indigenous to palestine;
uncultured crowns and criminal uncles
have no jurisdiction over our Earthright.

Earth belongs to the Natives, settlers are
welcome, but as participant, not head of state.
Somos indígenas, somos indomables -
you can make us houseless, but never homeless.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Baseball is a resplendent metaphor for life.”
― Gary Hardwick, Dark Town Redemption

“The police are the civilian side of the military that wage war on the general public.”
― Steven Magee

“Surveying the media landscape in 1968, who could miss the overwhelming white male dominance of ownership, management, and content creation? If television was a new driver of the national conversation, what sort of meaningful dialogue could be had without major participation by minorities?”
― Jon Else, True South: Henry Hampton and "Eyes on the Prize," the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement

“Eyes on the Prize" may be a grainy old fossil of a movie, but you can learn a lot from fossils if you understand where they sit on the layers of rock and how they go there.”
― Jon Else, True South: Henry Hampton and "Eyes on the Prize," the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement

“King had marched six weeks earlier through the Mississippi town where the civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were murdered. He had called it the most savage place he had ever seen. Now he revised his opinion: 'I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“From the suffragettes to the civil rights movement, what was once condemned as radical disruption is now celebrated as moral courage. We must remember this pattern – and refuse to let our rights be eroded by fear. This is not new, and we will not be silenced.”
― Charlotte Church

“Holocaust for holocaust leaves humanity in plaster cast.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Landback is the mother of all movements, it contains the plight of all First Humans.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“The interesting things that can go in a book, you can't write”
― Chris Crowe, Thurgood Marshall

“They kill our leaders, then they kill us for protesting.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“People get used to anything. The less you think about your oppression, the more your tolerance for it grows. After a while, people just think oppression is the normal state of things.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“any community seriously concerned with its own freedom has to be concerned about other peoples' freedom as well.”
― Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography

“Feeling that our demands were moderate, I had assumed that they would be granted with little question; I had believed that the privileged would give up their privileges on request. This experience, however, taught me a lesson. I came to see that no one gives up his privileges without strong resistance.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story

“At Selma's small visitors' center, an elderly white man took out a street map and carefully marked a half-dozen historic sites: antebellum mansions, remnants of the 1865 battle, the Pettus Bridge, the Martin Luther King Historic Walking Tour, and the Voting Rights Museum. "We've always lived in the past in Selma, and we still do," he said. "But the past has changed on us. It includes a lot of stories it didn't used to.”
― Tony Horwitz, Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War

“And true, they are hurling spittle, rock,
Garbage and fruit in Little Rock.
And I saw coiling storm a-writhe
On bright madonnas. And a scythe
Of men harassing brownish girls.
(The bows and barrettes in the curls
And braids declined away from joy.)

I saw a bleeding brownish boy....

The lariat lynch-wish I deplored.

The loveliest lynchee was our Lord.”
― Gwendolyn Brooks, The Bean Eaters