Civil Rights Movement Quotes

Browse through our collection of quotes tagged with Civil Rights Movement.

The self-congratulatory popular account insists that Dr. Kin

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

Truth Martin Luther King Jr Civil Rights Movement

For years, I declined to fill in the form for my Senate pres

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

Race Identity Politics Sexism Skin Colour Martin Luther King Jr Civil Rights Movement Caucasian Race Ethnology Perjury

The question is not if we will be extremists, but what kind

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.

Creativity Activism Civil Rights Movement