Darryl Pinckney Quotes

Through protest - especially in the 1950s and '60s - we, as a people, touched greatness. Protest, not immigration, was our way into the American Dream. Freedom in this country had always been relative to race, and it was black protest that made freedom an absolute.

The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.

Why can a Communist eat at a lunch counter in Selma, Alabama while a Black American veteran cannot?

If segregationists had their way, I would not be a member of the United States Senate today, I would not be a top contender to be president of the United States.

I grew up in a time when there was real segregation. And blacks during the 50s and so forth took a lot of responsibility for their lives because the government didn't.

Boycotts have been a critical part of social justice in American history, particularly for African-Americans.

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.

The Civil Rights Movement, it wasn't just a couple of, you know, superstars like Martin Luther King. It was thousands and thousands - millions, I should say - of people taking risks, becoming leaders in their community.

The separate water foundations, park benches, bathrooms and restaurants of the Jim Crow South startled me. These experiences motivated my lifelong study of the status of African Americans and the sources of improvement in that status.

It is over one hundred years since the abolition of slavery. The Negro people in the United States have taken plenty and they have reached a stage where they have decided that they are not going to take any more.

In '42,' it's like the '40s where racial equality had come into the consciousness of a lot of people, whereas in the 1900s it was sort of a new thing.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.

I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.

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.

Civil rights was not an impossible dream. Thousands of brave African Americans stepped forward to make it happen.

The history of American democracy, to say the least, has been checkered. Our nation was founded at a time when people of African descent were held in bondage. After slavery was abolished, they were forced to endure legal discrimination for another 100 years.

Being so closely related to the South, barbecue was part of segregation and helped defeat it.

Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.

For a black student to work in southwest Mississippi for example - or in the Delta in 1960, 1961, 1962 - was high-risk work.

When I was teaching in the 1960s in Boston, there was a great deal of hope in the air. Martin Luther King Jr. was alive, Malcolm X was alive; great, great leaders were emerging from the southern freedom movement.

I'd like to think I would have signed the Civil Rights bill and wouldn't have had any issues with it.

You go through the Civil Rights struggle, everybody knew the songs - 'We shall overcome.' Everybody would sing it. Music helped us. James Brown, 'Say It Loud - I'm Black and I'm Proud.' They helped black people figure out how to navigate what was a very treacherous place in America for them.

LBJ’s policies were giving American blacks hope they’d never had, they found intolerable what they had once accepted as inevitable.