Top 75 Civil Rights Movement Quotes

Like most Americans of my age, I was very impressed by the dynamic capacities of the law, demonstrated by the Civil Rights Movement and then Watergate, animated by Sam Ervin’s mantra that no person is above the law.

What has been adjudicated and established in the wake of Vietnam and the Civil Rights movement is the ability of the press to basically write or broadcast almost anything about the government. There’s very few restrictions in that way.

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 arts and a belief in the values of the civil rights movement, in the overwhelming virtue of diversity, these were our religion. My parents worshipped those ideals.

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.

We have a tendency to sugar coat the Civil Rights movement by showing arm in arm and everyone singing ‘Kumbaya’. We don’t really always show the resistance from the government, the resistance from the status quo, from the majority to silence the movement.

The tragedy of the civil rights movement is that just as it achieved the beginning of the end of racial segregation, white educated elites became swept up in the glamour of the sexual revolution.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement.

Even here in America, people are fighting for civil rights 45 years after the civil rights movement.

The civil rights movement was not a mirage… It was live and in living color.

I was part of the peace movement and part of the civil rights movement. You know what we heard? ‘The majority of people don’t support you.’

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.

My earliest memories are when my father was the attorney general at the height of the Civil Rights Movement. We would go to visit him at the Justice Department and take the tunnel over to the FBI building and watch the sharpshooters at practice.

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 grow up with a heightened sense of the Civil Rights Movement, but I think it wasn’t until I became of age that I really had a great appreciation for the struggle that took place.

Growing up in Mississippi – a state that historically was a place of racial injustice, inequality and oppression – gave me the unique opportunity to experience first-hand the evolution of the civil rights movement through the eyes of my parents, grandparents, and the black elders of our community.

During the 60’s, I was, in fact, very concerned about the civil rights movement.

I think people instinctively know that their job is to give service and that they are part of a community. It had a great impact on me when my father walked the picket lines and I walked with him during the civil rights movement.

I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn’t qualify.

The social issues outside of football are not as defined as they were earlier, when integration took place and certain rights were legislated. The Civil Rights movement is over. Individuals can buy homes wherever they want, travel first class wherever they want, eat wherever they want.

Without prayer, without faith in the Almighty, the civil rights movement would have been like a bird without wings.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 civil rights movement didn’t end on August 6, 1965. It continued because the work of creating a truly equal country never ends.

Let me go over this again on the reclaiming the civil rights movement. People of faith that believe that you have an equal right to justice – that is the essence. And if it’s not the essence, then we’ve been sold a pack of lies. The essence is everyone deserves a shot – the content of character, not the color of skin.

It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1950s and ’60s that Congress got serious about the assignment laid out in the post-Civil War amendments.

My mom, Clida, taught my four brothers and me about her father’s work to organize black voters in rural Louisiana in the 1950s. We carried her dad’s legacy of activism with us. The Civil Rights Movement was present in the daily life of my family in Detroit in the 1970s.

Forgiveness became a big part of the civil rights movement, juxtaposed against the violence of protesters and law enforcement. King described forgiveness in one of his early sermons as a pardon, a process of life, and the Christian weapon of social redemption.

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.

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.

The very rights that we supposedly won for African Americans in the civil rights movement no longer exist for those labeled felons. That’s why I say we have not ended racial caste in America; we’ve merely redesigned it.

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.

Quakers are known for wanting to give back. Ban the bomb and the civil rights movement and the native American struggle for justice – those things were very, very front-burner in my childhood, as were the ideas of working for peace and if you have more than you need, then you share it with people who don’t.

When the women’s liberation movement began, when people began protesting against the Vietnam War, civil rights movement, at the beginning of those movements, the majority of the country was not with them, did not believe in the basic principles of any of those philosophies.

My father wanted me to be a dentist like him, or any doctor, really. There was this attitude of, ‘The civil rights movement was not about you being an artist.’

Because when we look at the modern civil rights movement under the leadership of my father and the team that he developed, it was at the federal level that we were able to appeal to bring about justice, whether it was in relationship to voting rights – just a number of issues.

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.

Berry Gordy is a music legend, and we all know that, but I don’t think Berry gets enough credit for his involvement with the civil rights movement.

At the same time all this was happening, there was a folk song revival movement goingon, so the commercial music industry was actually changed by the Civil Rights Movement.

No civil rights movement has gotten anywhere without the help of white liberals.

Like the majority of Atlanta’s residents, I am Black. Our city helped birth the modern civil rights movement, and I am the daughter of a civil rights leader.

I was a child coming up in the aftermath of the Civil Rights Movement.

The mindfulness revolution is not quite as dramatic as the moon shot or the civil rights movement, but I believe, in the long run, it can have just as great an impact.

I feel very strongly that the Democratic Party has, in the past, been the party of the future. I think when you look at Social Security and Medicare, when you look at the civil rights movement, the women’s movement, I think the Democratic Party has always been in the forefront of change.

John Lewis’ vital role in the civil rights movement will never be forgotten, and his legacy will forever be acknowledged by our state and our country.

Respectfully, the civil rights movement for people with disabilities is modeled on the African American civil rights movement. I’m old enough to remember 1964. I was a junior in high school.

The church is the only mechanism for mass mobilization. That’s why the civil rights movement came out of the church.

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 love how music and chants were used in the Civil Rights movement to help people keep marching. How songs were both a balm and a call to action.

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’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 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.

Anyone who said he wasn’t afraid during the civil rights movement was either a liar or without imagination. I was scared all the time. My hands didn’t shake but inside I was shaking.

My grandmother had been a part of the civil rights movement.

I got interested in politics during the civil rights movement and then Vietnam.

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.

Many Catholic parishes were segregated prior to the Civil Rights movement, and the first large contingent of African-American Catholic priests would enter into the seminary in the 1920s.

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.

In college, I got interested in news because the world was coming apart. The civil rights movement, the antiwar movement, the women’s right movement. That focused my radio ambitions toward news.

I would want to go back to the civil rights movement and see how that was. With the information and knowledge I have about it now, I would want to see how I would deal with it.

When I think about our babies today and them not being safe in school, I think that should be the next civil rights movement, you know, is to ban the assault weapons so that our babies can be safe.

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.

I don’t think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.

When I was younger, I had these romantic ideas about the Black Panther Party and what it meant to be a part of the civil rights movement. Then we’re here, and it’s dangerous. And it’s dangerous to say, ‘Black lives matter.’

If Willie Nelson had been Rosa Parks, there never would have been a civil rights movement in this country, because he refuses to leave the back of the bus.

I had very little exposure to business growing up. I also was very focused on the Civil Rights Movement. And I saw law as a vehicle to really bring about substantial change.

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.

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.

Martin Luther King, Jr., would have been the last person to have wanted his iconization and his heroism. He was an enormously guilt-laden man. He was drenched in a sense of shame about his being featured as the preeminent leader of African-American culture and the civil rights movement.

Felons are typically stripped of the very rights supposedly won in the civil rights movement, including the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, access to education, and public benefits. They’re relegated to a permanent undercaste.

In the 1960s, the civil rights movement was about getting to know your culture, your history. I know all about my history.

In college, I was so blessed to have relationships with those who did the civil rights movement.