Civil Rights Movement Quotes

“The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. The nation and the world are in dire need of creative extremists.”
― Martin Luther King Jr.

“It was civil disobedience that won them their civil rights.”
― Tariq Ali, The Obama Syndrome: Surrender at Home, War Abroad

“Three hundred years of humiliation, abuse and deprivation cannot be expected to find voice in a whisper.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait

“For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate press credential that asked me to state my 'race,' unless I was permitted to put 'human.' The form had to be completed under penalty of perjury, so I could not in conscience put 'white,' which is not even a color let alone a 'race,' and I sternly declined to put 'Caucasian,' which is an exploded term from a discredited ethnology. Surely the essential and unarguable core of King's campaign was the insistence that pigmentation was a false measure: a false measure of mankind (yes, mankind) and an inheritance from a time of great ignorance and stupidity and cruelty, when one drop of blood could make you 'black.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“If you believe in a cause, be willing to stand up for that cause with a million people or by yourself.”
― Otis S. Johnson, FROM "N" WORD TO MR. MAYOR

“Sit on the truth too long and you mash the life right out of it.”
― Margaret McMullan, Sources of Light

“The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. King called on the nation to fully accept its own creed, and the walls came a-tumbling down. This conventional narrative is soothing, moving, and politically acceptable, and has only the disadvantage of bearing no resemblance to what actually happened.”
― Timothy B. Tyson, Blood Done Sign My Name: A True Story

“A jail within a jail. In those long hours, he struggled over Reverend King's equation. "Throw us in jail and we will love you ... But be assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom. We will not only win our freedom for ourselves, we will so appeal to your heart and your conscience that we will win you in the process and our victory will be a double victory." No he could not make that leap to love. He understood neither the impulse of the proposition nor the will to execute it.”
― Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys

“And all Negroes at some period of their lives there is that yearning for a sense of group unity that is the yearning of men for a flag: for a unity that cannot be compromised, that cannot be bought; that is conscious of itself, of its strength, that is militant.”
― Ralph Ellison

“I am an invisible man. No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids -- and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination -- indeed, everything and anything except me.”
― Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man

“Often ignored by civil rights historians, a number of campaigns led to trials and even convictions throughout the South. These cases, many virtually unknown, broke with Southern tradition and fractured the philosophical and political foundations of white supremacy by challenging the relationship between sexual domination and racial equality.”
― Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance--A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power

“Senator John Stennis:
The civil rights movement did more to free the white man that the black man. ... It freed my soul.”
― Joe Biden, Promises to Keep: On Life and Politics

“The white liberal must honestly ask himself why he supported the movement in the first place. If he supported it for the right reasons, he will continue to support it in spite of the confusions of the present moment. But if he supported the movement for the wrong reasons, he will find every available excuse to withdraw from it now, and he will discover that he was inoculated with so mild a form of commitment that he was immune to the genuine moral article.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“As Negroes move forward toward a fundamental alteration of their lives, some bitter white opposition is bound to grow, even within groups that were hospitable to earlier superficial amelioration. Conflicts are unavoidable because a stage has been reached in which the reality of equality will require extensive adjustments in the way of life of some of the white majority. Many of our former supporters will fall by the wayside as the movement presses against financial privilege. Others will withdraw as long-established cultural privileges are threatened. During this period we will have to depend on that creative minority of true believers.

The hope of the world is still in dedicated minorities. The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific and religious freedom have always been in the minority. That creative minority of whites absolutely committed to civil rights can make it clear to the larger society that vacillation and procrastination on the question of racial justice can no longer be tolerated. It will take such a small committed minority to work unrelentingly to win the uncommitted majority. Such a group may well transform America’s greatest dilemma into her most glorious opportunity.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“Within the white majority there exists a substantial group who cherish democratic principles above privilege and who have demonstrated a will to fight side by side with the Negro against injustice. Another and more substantial group is composed of those having common needs with the Negro and who will benefit equally with him in the achievement of social progress. There are, in fact, more poor white Americans than there are Negro. Their need for a war on poverty is no less desperate than the Negro’s. In the South they have been deluded by race prejudice and largely remained aloof from common action. Ironically, with this posture they were fighting not only the Negro but themselves.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“A final challenge that we face as a result of our great dilemma is to be ever mindful of enlarging the whole society, and giving it a new sense of values as we seek to solve our particular problem. As we work to get rid of the economic strangulation that we face as a result of poverty, we must not overlook the fact that millions of Puerto Ricans, Mexican Americans, Indians and Appalachian whites are also poverty-stricken. Any serious war against poverty must of necessity include them. As we work to end the educational stagnation that we face as a result of inadequate segregated schools, we must not be unmindful of the fact, as Dr. James Conant has said, the whole public school system is using nineteenth-century educational methods in conditions of twentieth-century urbanization, and that quality education must be enlarged for all children. By and large, the civil rights movement has followed this course, and in so doing has contributed infinitely more to the nation than the eradication of racial injustice. In winning rights for ourselves we have produced substantial benefits for the whole nation.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“Power is not the white man’s birthright; it will not be legislated for us and delivered in neat government packages. It is a social force any group can utilize by accumulating its elements in a planned, deliberate campaign to organize it under its own control.”
― Martin Luther King Jr., Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community?

“Earth Belongs to The Natives (Sonnet 2401)

We cannot abolish systemic persecution
without dismantling systemic privilege.
You cannot wipe the slate clean, but you can
take the responsibility and stand to heal.

Colonizers are the second class citizens,
every land first belongs to the indigenous.
Landback is the mother of all movements,
it contains the plight of all First Humans.

Women are indigenous to their own body,
Palestinians are indigenous to palestine;
uncultured crowns and criminal uncles
have no jurisdiction over our Earthright.

Earth belongs to the Natives, settlers are
welcome, but as participant, not head of state.
Somos indígenas, somos indomables -
you can make us houseless, but never homeless.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“Baseball is a resplendent metaphor for life.”
― Gary Hardwick, Dark Town Redemption

“I am numb with confusion and horror at how the corridors of power are inspired by errors, exaggerations and lies to mislead the entire nation. We should be under no illusion the political will to fix what is broken is fully evaporated.”
― Qamar Rafiq

“Enough contemplation of the government’s misdeeds: today, I thought to break my silence about how rogue prime ministers, incompetent cabinet ministers, corrupt bureaucrats, dishonest judges, and unkind military dictators bring me to an era of total breakdown.”
― Qamar Rafiq

“The police are the civilian side of the military that wage war on the general public.”
― Steven Magee

“Surveying the media landscape in 1968, who could miss the overwhelming white male dominance of ownership, management, and content creation? If television was a new driver of the national conversation, what sort of meaningful dialogue could be had without major participation by minorities?”
― Jon Else, True South: Henry Hampton and "Eyes on the Prize," the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement

“Eyes on the Prize" may be a grainy old fossil of a movie, but you can learn a lot from fossils if you understand where they sit on the layers of rock and how they go there.”
― Jon Else, True South: Henry Hampton and "Eyes on the Prize," the Landmark Television Series That Reframed the Civil Rights Movement

“King had marched six weeks earlier through the Mississippi town where the civil rights workers Goodman, Chaney, and Schwerner were murdered. He had called it the most savage place he had ever seen. Now he revised his opinion: 'I think the people of Mississippi ought to come to Chicago to learn how to hate.”
― Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“What pains me deeply is the growing fear that religious freedom and my homeland may forever remain like two banks of a river always close yet destined never to unite.”
― Qamar Rafiq

“From the suffragettes to the civil rights movement, what was once condemned as radical disruption is now celebrated as moral courage. We must remember this pattern – and refuse to let our rights be eroded by fear. This is not new, and we will not be silenced.”
― Charlotte Church

“Holocaust for holocaust leaves humanity in plaster cast.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Kral Fakir: When Calls The Kainat

“Landback is the mother of all movements, it contains the plight of all First Humans.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Sonnets From The Mountaintop

“The interesting things that can go in a book, you can't write”
― Chris Crowe, Thurgood Marshall