Civil Rights Movement Quotes

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.

I came out of the Civil Rights Movement, and I had a different kind of focus than most people who have just the academic background as their primary training experience.

Everyone puts all of the advances that we’ve made on Dr. King, but there’s a lot of people who were part of the civil rights movement.

I have loved the Department of Justice ever since, as a young boy, I watched Robert Kennedy prove during the Civil Rights Movement how the department can – and must – always be a force for that which is right.

The civil rights movement is understanding your freedom under the Constitution of these United States and if anyone tries to take those freedoms from you, you better rise up and fight and that’s what we’re doing together.

I earned my spurs in the civil rights movement. All my life, not for political but for religious reasons, moral reasons, that’s where I’ve been, and I’m proud of it, and I’ll always be there.

There is a source of power in each of us that we don’t realize until we take responsibility.

This is Not Another Revolution. This is a Civil Rights Movement

The liberal psyche wants to protect minorities, to apologize for imperialism, colonialism, slavery, and the appalling treatment of black people during the civil rights movement. At the same time, they want to continue to defend the rights of individuals.

My friends in the Congress, I have known Coretta King since I went south during the civil rights movement as a lawyer. She was a vibrant, consistent, totally dedicated partner with her husband.

We don’t want to blame the victim. The civil rights movement had a profound effect on the United States and on the American mind, maybe unique in the world. Once we realized how victimized people of color had been, an honest empathy went out and that’s how we got civil rights legislation.

Eyes is the attempt to tell the story of the Civil Rights movement and to create an emotional, intellectual constituency. But what do you do after that? The black community doesn’t have institutions that pick up such moments and preserve them.

I think hip-hop has definitely brought the black experience to white kids more than the civil rights movement did and more than any teacher’s well-intentioned lecture on Martin Luther King did.

Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.

We’ve seen the worst that human beings are capable of. We’ve seen what happens when leaders abandon common decency in favor of rage and hate. Through the lens of history, the Holocaust happened yesterday, the civil rights movement was this morning, so we are not as out of the woods as we might have thought.

I think the legacy of the civil rights movement is that now whites are more open to being represented by people of color or people who are women or, again, non-traditional candidates.

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.