I agree that income disparity is the great issue of our time. It is even broader and more difficult than the civil rights issues of the 1960s. The ’99 percent’ is not just a slogan. The disparity in income has left the middle class with lowered, not rising, income, and the poor unable to reach the middle class.
Civil rights was not an impossible dream. Thousands of brave African Americans stepped forward to make it happen.
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.
There are many photos of Catholic priests and nuns marching in the Civil Rights movement, most notably at the March on Selma, Ala. in 1965. However, the history of Catholicism in this country tells a different story.
Prior to civil rights, the Democratic Party had been defined by an increasingly untenable alliance of ideological opposites – integrationist Northern liberals like Hubert Humphrey and Herbert Lehman teamed with Southern segregationists like Richard Russell and John Stennis.
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.
At the same time the folk boom was happening, the civil rights movement was happening, the anti-war movement was happening, the ban the bomb movement was happening, the environmental movement was happening. There was suddenly a generation ready to change the course of history.
When I arrived in America, I experienced serious culture shock. For someone with a religious upbringing, the 1960s were an extremely difficult time. Even though religion was a big part of the civil rights and peace movements, in my college religion was treated as irrelevant, hopelessly stodgy, and behind the times.
One of the triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement is that when you travel through the South today, you do not feel overwhelmed by a residue of grievance and hate.
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.
If surveillance infiltrates our homes and personal relationships, that is a gross breach of our human and civil rights.
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.
Always remember Rahm Emanuel and those of his ilk who are opposed to our fundamental civil right to keep and bear arms when you donate to NRA-ILA or the NRA Civil Rights Legal Defense Fund.
Civil rights and women’s rights and gay rights all take time in this country.
No Republican questions or disputes civil rights. I have never wavered in my support for civil rights or the civil rights act.
By the 1960s, many of us believed that the Civil Rights Movement could eliminate racism in America during our lifetime. But despite significant progress, racism remains.
Diversity in books is a civil rights frontier.
The civil rights movement wasn’t easy for anybody.
I’ve always stood for my people, with my people, but some guys just don’t have voices like that. I don’t like the pressure some people put on others. Some people are just not built for it. Some guys just play basketball, they don’t talk, they don’t post. Everybody in the ’60s wasn’t in the civil rights movement.
Protecting the rights of service members was an important part of my work as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights.
From our nation’s founding to the Civil Rights movement, Virginians have always stood up to fight for their most foundational right – a voice in our government.
Ossie Davis is one of my heroes for civil rights and things like that.
Confirming John Roberts would endanger much of the progress made by the nation in civil rights over the past half century.
My image had always been very heterosexual, very straight. So it was a nice experience for me, a chance to clarify my own feelings about gay and lesbian civil rights.
In a typical history book, black Americans are mentioned in the context of slavery or civil rights. There’s so much more to the story.
Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.
Health care is not a privilege. It’s a right. It’s a right as fundamental as civil rights. It’s a right as fundamental as giving every child a chance to get a public education.
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.
I’d like to think I would have signed the Civil Rights bill and wouldn’t have had any issues with it.
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.
Apple is to the United States government what Clarence Thomas was to the civil rights coalition. How dare you get this big sidestepping us.
When the civil rights battle was won, all the Jews and hippies and artists were middle class white people and all the blacks were still poor. Materially, not much changed.
I have always had a great deal of respect and admiration for Eleanor Roosevelt. She was a true humanitarian and champion of Women’s Rights and Civil Rights.
In reality, civil rights are more important than national rights. They’re the content, the day-to-day: work, life. But people are sensitive to national rights.
Well, it’s the last step of the civil rights movement: You know, wrap your hands around some money, right?
I think that some of the greatest muckrakers and some of the greatest investigative journalists of all time had strong feelings about civil rights. There is a role for the journalist-advocate. And as long as you play your cards on the table, I think that’s a role that we should allow.
I always wondered why there weren’t any films about Cesar Chavez. There are movies about other civil rights leaders in this country, but why not Chavez?
Census data is used to determine more than $675 billion in federal funding; it is a demographic Rosetta Stone that is referenced in the drawing of congressional districts, each states number of Electoral College votes and the application of civil rights laws, including the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing Act.
Any new legal measures, or cooperative arrangements between government and companies meant to keep people from organizing violence or criminal actions, must not be carried out in ways that erode due process, rule of law and the protection of innocent citizens’ political and civil rights.
The human rights community has focused very narrowly on political and civil rights for many decades, and with reason, but now we have to ask how can we broaden the view.
A black man of my generation born in the late 1960s is more than twice as likely to go to prison in his lifetime then a black man of my father’s generation. I was born after the Voting Rights Act, after the Civil Rights Act, after the Fair Housing Act.
Where race is concerned, America has had a horrible, a wretched history and that came to account in the 1960s, with the Civil Rights victories and Civil Rights Bill and housing and so forth.
As a Westerner, the child of civil rights and anti-war activists, I embraced Islam not in abandonment of my core values, drawn almost entirely from the progressive tradition, but as an affirmation of them.
The American people hit the streets and did something that the government wouldn’t do: the Civil Rights Act. It didn’t go down well with the corporate world.
I’m a civil rights attorney. I’m a victim rights attorney.
The civil rights and antiwar movements taught Americans to question authority.
Where is the civil rights groundswell on behalf of stronger marriages that will allow more children to grow up in two-parent families and have a better chance of staying out of poverty?
In the time when my mother began standing up against prejudice and racism, the vast majority of white Americans rarely thought about civil rights.
Growing up, my birthday was always Confederate Memorial Day. It helped to create this profound sense of awareness about the Civil War and the 100 years between the Civil War and the civil rights movement and my parents’ then-illegal and interracial marriage.
Too often, advances in civil rights or women’s rights are undermined by wrong-headed legislation or weak-kneed political leadership.
And my mother fought hard for civil rights so that instead of a mop, I could hold this microphone.
Marriage is sacred and protected and has nothing to do with violating our civil rights.
The demands of the Civil Rights era weren’t limited to voting rights – they strove for an end to segregation in all aspects of life, including housing, employment, and public accommodations.
