Quotes about Civil rights

Nonviolence, the answer to the Negroes' need, may become the answer to the most desperate need of all humanity.

Their objectives included the elimination of Birmingham's rigid segregation. They wanted the right to vote. They wanted jobs and the ability to try on clothes in all the places where they shopped. They wanted public schools opened to all children without regard to the color of their skin.

Why does misery constantly haunt the Negro?

I had been fighting too long and too hard now against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns.

What we were really doing was withdrawing our cooperation from an evil system, rather than merely withdrawing our economic support from the bus company.

I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action.

What good is having the right to sit at a lunch counter if you can't afford to buy a hamburger?

One old domestic, an influential matriarch to many young relatives in Montgomery, was asked by her wealthy employer, "Isn't this bus boycott terrible?" The old lady responded: "Yes, ma'am, it sure is. And I just told all my young'uns that this kind of thing is white folks' business and we just stay off the buses till they get this whole thing settled.

One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws.

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can keep him from lynching me, and I think that's pretty important.

The government can't make people love me, but it can keep them from lynching me.

Most blacks have lost the moral authority to claim the mantle of civil rights because they refuse to stand for what is right.