You know what Americans are really sensitive to? Issues of fairness. I think this is a modern phenomenon, born of the civil rights movement. Once you convince Americans that something is basically unfair, you’ve got a winning cause.
In the ’60s, when I was growing up, one of the great elements of American culture was the protest song. There were songs about the civil rights movement, the women’s rights movement, the antiwar movement. It wasn’t just Bob Dylan, it was everybody at the time.
The essence of Ferguson is the spirit of the people, and I’m so happy to see the spirit because I haven’t seen it like that since the Civil Rights Movement.
When I got lucky enough to be successful as an actor, and I got involved in the anti-war stuff and gay rights movement, there was always this thing eating at me about the death penalty, because that was, to me, the bottom line. That was the anti-life – by definition – position, and I didn’t understand why we did it.
The civil rights movement didn’t end on August 6, 1965. It continued because the work of creating a truly equal country never ends.
My parents both were doing the Civil Rights Movement, were very involved with the civil rights to Congress. And my friends’ parents were as well.
I always saw my role as getting LGBT to support the immigrant rights movement – which they did – and getting Latino organizations to support the women’s movement, for reproductive rights. So that’s kind of the work that I’ve always been doing.
The Underground Railroad, which was the first integrated civil rights movement, is a part of our history that not a lot of us know about. And it’s actually a very empowering side of our history.
The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything.
I think every high school student who was alert during the early ’60s got very embittered by the slow progress and the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement.
Half a century ago, the amazing courage of Rosa Parks, the visionary leadership of Martin Luther King, and the inspirational actions of the civil rights movement led politicians to write equality into the law and make real the promise of America for all her citizens.
My parents demonstrated against the Vietnam war, they were into the civil rights movement, the feminist movement, they started the first vegetarian restaurant in Pittsburgh.
The civil rights movement wasn’t easy for anybody.
Without prayer, without faith in the Almighty, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings.
Mrs. Parks was a shy, soft spoken woman who was uncomfortable being revered as a symbol of the civil rights movement. She only hoped to inspire young people to achieve great things.
I’ve always been interested in how things change, in social change. I was involved in the animal rights movement as a young woman, I’ve been involved in thinking about gender and issues around racism and so on.
It is an insult for me to have been alive through the times you are calling the so-called civil rights movement. I don’t celebrate my humiliations and my insults.
John Brown first swam into my vision in the 1960s when I was a political activist in the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement at Chapel Hill, where I went to university.
As a civil rights leader, Mrs. King’s vision of racial peace and nonviolent social change was a fortifying staple in advancing the civil rights movement.
For many years as a foreign correspondent, I not only worked alongside human rights advocates, but considered myself one of them. To defend the rights of those who have none was the reason I became a journalist in the first place. Now, I see the human rights movement as opposing human rights.
I’ve done a lot of research about the Civil Rights movement, and I’m fascinated with how difficult it would have been for a black man to show feelings toward a white woman in that time period.
I’m praying for ‘Ice Age’ 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. Because I really think we can run those characters into the ’60s, and I’m talking the 1960s, you know? The Civil Rights Movement. That’s what I’m praying for, because then I wouldn’t have to do anything else.
I think the Civil Rights Movement changed that trajectory for me. The first thing I did was leave school. I was suspended for my participation in Movement demonstrations in my hometown, December, 1961.
A lot of the idealism of the Sixties was spot on, from the environmentalism to the war to the Civil Rights movement, the women’s rights movement, you name it.
One individual can begin a movement that turns the tide of history. Martin Luther King in the civil rights movement, Mohandas Ganhi in India, Nelson Mandela in South Africa are examples of people standing up with courage and non-violence to bring about needed changes.
Forgiveness is a big part of – especially post-civil rights movement – is a big part of African-American Christianity, and I wasn’t raised within the Christian church; I wasn’t raised within any church.
I was a child coming up in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement.
The Underground Railroad was the first integrated civil rights movement. And it’s a great example of when we work together, what we can go against. Which is 600 miles of crazy terrain being chased by slave catchers to get people to be what they should be in the first case – which is free.
The most ironic outcome of the black Civil Rights movement has been the creation of a new black middle class which is increasingly separate from the black underclass.
There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites.
Culture is about humanizing people. You look at the African-American civil rights movement, you look at the LGBT rights movement – the culture changed before the politics did.
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.
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.
The seminal right of the modern civil rights movement was the right to vote. My father fought so diligently for it. Certainly Congressman John Lewis and many others, Hosea Williams, fought for it as well.
We need to fight for a new human rights movement that recognizes and values black life.
The civil rights movement was about access to public space. We had to fight for public space.
Black women fought for the right to vote during the suffrage movement and fought again during the civil rights movement. The rote narrative in the press of the civil rights movement is truncated with the briefest of histories of men like Martin Luther King Jr., Jesse Jackson, or John Lewis.
I don’t think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.
The fighting back by indigenous people started in 1900: OK, they’ve cornered us. Our population is almost gone; they’ve defeated us. From there, the modern Indian rights movement started, and it was a very hard fight, with a lot of stuff going against them.
The rise of African nations concurrent with the spread of the Nation of Islam and the civil rights movement gave black America a burst of pride over and above anything they had had since the decline of the movement of Marcus Garvey.
I think, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks will go down as one of the two most well-known and remembered figures out of the Civil Rights Movement.
My parents were very active in the Civil Rights Movement. My father was a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) worker; my mother was a secretary with the Panthers.
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.
The civil rights movement would experience many important victories, but Rosa Parks will always be remembered as its catalyst.
Rock ‘n’ roll was uniting black kids and white kids, and rock ‘n’ roll is not being given credit… for being just as important to the civil rights movement as the activists.
One thing the gay rights movement taught the world is the importance of being visible.
We can revolutionize the attitude of inner city brown and black kids to learning. We need a civil rights movement within the African-American community.
You know, as a child of Palestinian immigrants, again, every corner of my district is a reminder of the civil rights movement, and I bring that lens, and I try to – you know, many of the Palestinians, they have called me, reached out to me via social media.
My father told me about American democracy. And he said you have to be actively engaged in the political process to make our democracy work. So I’ve been doing that my entire life. Civil rights movement. The peace movement during the Vietnam conflict. The movement to get an apology and redress for Japanese-Americans.
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.
