Charles Hamilton Houston Quotes

There is a magnificent new militancy within the Negro community all across this nation. And I welcome this as a marvelous development. The Negro of America is saying he's determined to be free and he is militant enough to stand up.

The Negro has been here in America since 1619, a total of 344 years. He is not going anywhere else; this country is his home. He wants to do his part to help make his city, state, and nation a better place for everyone, regardless of color and race.

The challenge of social justice is to evoke a sense of community that we need to make our nation a better place, just as we make it a safer place.

Marriage equality changed life for people.

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.

The great majority of the states look upon segregation as discrimination. And those few states that have a special problem in this respect will, in a variety of ways, slowly have to solve their problem and accept the will of the majority.

The essence of Ferguson is the spirit of the people, and I'm so happy to see the spirit because I haven't seen it like that since the Civil Rights Movement.

There was a time that human rights was not even an issue in this country. Then prisoners' rights became an issue.

There's so many people who've built America, much greater in sacrifice and contributions than Silicon Valley. There are people who've died for this country. There are people who have marched for civil rights in this country.

My music is made for the people who are willing to stand up to change this world themselves.

Our ultimate objective in learning about anything is to try to create and develop a more just society.

Be prepared to organize nonviolent workshops - a teach-in around what is happening in America today. Organize your teachers and schoolmates, and be prepared to engage in some action.

We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of Now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy

A lot of people want to change the world, but only a few people want to change themselves. When it comes to the issue of race in America, we have to do both.

Should a community... be free to enact legislation to say they don't want blacks? Now that's illegal. Fifty years ago it was legal. Is that progress or is that regress?

The Warmth of Other Suns is a sweeping and yet deeply personal tale of America's hidden 20th century history - the long and difficult trek of Southern blacks to the northern and western cities. This is an epic for all Americans who want to understand the making of our modern nation.

I mean, we do believe in due process in America. I thought we did.

America is perhaps excessively mobile in the sense that there is sometimes not enough stability in communities. Dynamism in the economy is not necessarily the "be all and end all".

But there are certain very practical things American Negro writers can do. And must do. There's a song that says, "the time ain't long." That song is right. Something has got to change in America-and change soon. We must help that change to come.

Charity is only a waystation on the road to justice.

What Martin Luther King is doing is disarming the black people of America of their God-given right and of their natural right.

America certainly has made extraordinary progress. The collective unconscious of the nation has certainly shifted as a result of the civil rights movement and the developments in the '70s and '80s. We have witnessed a great expansion of the black middle class.

As [Martin Luther] King said, it never cost anybody a dime to integrate the lunch counters. When you start talking about trying to deal with jobs and hunger and things that require investment, then that's really the tough stuff, because everybody wants to do right if it doesn't cost them anything.

[on marriage equality] It literally is a threat to the nation's survival in the long run.

After Hitler was destroyed, there was the threat of Stalin, but it was always the world pressure that was upon America that enabled black people to go forward. It was not the initiative internally that the Negro put forth in America, nor was it a change of moral heart on the part of Uncle Sam it was world pressure.