Civil Rights Movement Quotes - Page 5

• 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.

  John F. Kerry

  Running, Kings, War

  Source: www.wbur.org

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• Persistence. Change doesn't happen overnight. You have to stay with it. Rosa Parks helped start the Civil Rights movement in earnest in 1955. Then it was nearly a decade until the Civil Rights Act was passed.

  Kabir Sehgal

  Persistence, Rights, Movement

  Source: bobmorris.biz

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• Let's look at two things real quickly: the civil rights movement in Mississippi in the Sixties and the Arab Spring starting in Tunisia and Cairo. What they had in common was people who were told, and who believed inside themselves, that they were a certain way, and the society at large believed it.

  Bill Ayers

  Spring, Real, Rights

  Source: thepointmag.com

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• I became a part of the Civil Rights movement early on and that has really shaped a great deal of my thinking.

  Amber Hollibaugh

  Thinking, Rights, Movement

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• In Cairo, these young men hanging around in the street, we're told these guys are lazy, they're uneducated, they don't care, they don't have any political instincts - just like the working class in America, apparently - and then suddenly what the hell happened? What was that? They changed the world by changing themselves. Now is that over? No. Is the civil rights movement over? No. These movements have not accomplished what they set out to accomplish.

  Bill Ayers

  Men, Rights, Class

  Source: thepointmag.com

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• I think this mythology - that we're all beyond race, of course our police officers aren't racist, of course our politicians don't mean any harm to people of color - this idea that we're beyond all that (so it must be something else) makes it difficult for young people as well as the grown-ups to be able to see clearly and honestly the truth of what's going on. It makes it difficult to see that the backlash against the Civil Rights Movement manifested itself in the form of mass incarceration, in the form of defunding and devaluing schools serving kids of color and all the rest.

  Michelle Alexander

  School, Mean, Kids

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• 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.

  Michelle Alexander

  Men, Rights, Black

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• What is the appeal of Trump, really? It's nostalgic: "Make America great again." Like European nationalists, he has a vision of a "real" America, one which predates globalization, immigration, feminism, the civil rights movement and technological change, an imaginary 1950s to which we can now return. That is actually not very different from the kind of language that Marine Le Pen uses, or parts of the Brexit movement.

  Anne Applebaum

  Real, Marine, Technological Change

  Source: www.spiegel.de

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• Not since the early days of the civil rights movement has America been given an opportunity as great as the opportunity we have now. It's one thing for us to avenge our pain, our anger, and our rage by targeting bin Laden and a handful of men who have wrought this villainy. But one should be wise enough to ask, What fueled all this? What continues to sustain the possibility that this will not go away? I think the answer is poverty.

  Harry Belafonte

  Wise, Pain, Men

  Source: www.yesmagazine.org

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• I think it is a must for young people and generations yet to come, to understand, to feel, to touch, to almost smell the drama of what happened a few short years ago [the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s]. So maybe, just maybe, we will never ever repeat this unbelievable time in our history. We have to tell it all, and make it plain, and make it clear, so people will never ever forget the distance we have come, and the progress we have yet to make.

  John Lewis

  Distance, Drama, Thinking

  Source: www.teachingbooks.net

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• I go back to the parallels with 1963, 1964 when white America really became aware of the brutality of segregation, the cruelty of the apartheid system which existed in the south. Then white people began to get on the freedom buses and travel to the south and be part of the voter registration drives and they... some of them were beaten and some of them were murdered but they stood with the African-American community and the civil rights movement. It's time for straight people to do that today and it is time for gay people to insist that they do that today.

  Cleve Jones

  Gay, White, America

  Source: www.bilerico.com

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• If we [gays] want to be equal under the law, we must now - as the great heroes of the Civil Rights movement of 1963 and 1964 showed us - turn our attention to the federal government.

  Cleve Jones

  Hero, Gay, Law

  Source: www.bilerico.com

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• 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.

  Mark Shields

  War, Rights, Movement

  Source: www.pbs.org

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• Students for a Democratic Society was also affiliated with the civil rights movement everywhere.

  Bill Ayers

  Rights, Movement, Students

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• I was a good liberal in some sense at that point. I wanted to end a war. I wanted to support the civil rights movement.

  Bill Ayers

  War, Rights, Support

  Source: www.truth-out.org

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• Maybe, just maybe, there should be a graphic novel dealing with the contribution of the women of the civil rights movement, to tell their story. The pain, the hurt. They raised their children. Some were working as maids, but when they left those kitchens, those homes, they made it to the mass meetings. And they put their bodies on the lines, also.

  John Lewis

  Hurt, Children, Pain

  "The Long March Of John Lewis". Interview with Jamil Smith on MTV News' "The Stakes" podcast, www.mtv.com. August 5, 2016.

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• Cartoons were very conservative. The country was very conservative. Although the liberals were allegedly in charge for a long time, there was a very acceptable balance what people would talk about in public. And I wanted to stretch those and move further out. And as the civil rights movement began, I started doing cartoons on that and on sit-ins and I was, along with Bill Mauldin, a great cartoonist out of World War II, arguably one of two white cartoonists doing this kind of work, Bill and me.

  Jules Feiffer

  Country, War, Moving

  Source: bigthink.com

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• Even in the civil rights movement, there were so many unbelievable women. They never, ever received the credit that they should have received. They did all of the, and I cannot say it, they did all of the dirty work. Hard work.

  John Lewis

  Dirty, Hard Work, Should Have

  "The Long March of John Lewis". Interview with Jamil Smith, www.mtv.com. August 5, 2016.

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• The civil-rights movement was completely impossible to achieve. But look at what ordinary people were able to do because they were willing to sacrifice their lives to stay with it. They didn't expect a political process to respond to them. They made the political process respond to them. To say "It's so bad I won't bother" is to give up on your children and give up on your future.

  Marian Wright Edelman

  Children, Giving Up, Sacrifice

  Interview with Jurnee Smollett-Bell, www.lennyletter.com. April 8, 2016.

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• Coming to the civil rights movement in the twentieth century, we begin to have this idea that's still with us today, which is that the main purpose of public education is closing achievement gaps.

  Dana Goldstein

  Achievement, Purpose, Today

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

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• There was a resistance movement in the white community, and there was a determined civil rights movement by our neighbors and friends in the African-American community. They had right on their side. They conducted themselves in high standards, with courage and determination, and they were victorious. They overcame.

  Jeff Sessions

  Determination, Rights, White

  Source: www.politico.com

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• There is an innocence or purity that we see in renewals and in the Mennonite church and a new an invigorated civil rights movement.

  Shane Claiborne

  Rights, Church, Movement

  "Embracing the Margins". Interview with Matt Dabbs, wineskins.org. November 17, 2015.

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• What is needed in the world today is a Civil Rights Movement for the Soul, freeing humanity at last from the oppression of its belief in a violent, angry, and vindictive God.

  Neale Donald Walsch

  Rights, Soul, Humanity

  "A Revolution Is What's Called For Here" by Neale Donald Walsch, www.marandapleasantmedia.com. April 7, 2013.

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• [A.J. Muste] was very influenced - in - influential in the peace movement, in the civil rights movement.

  Nat Hentoff

  Rights, Movement, Influential

  Source: thedailyhatch.org

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• Most students graduate from high school knowing nine words about the civil rights movement: Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King, and "I Have a Dream." And that's it!

  Andrew Aydin

  Dream, Kings, School

  Source: www.mtv.com

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