James Meredith Quotes

I realized that my grandfather walked with Martin Luther King forty years ago. That was his dream. And in his little way, he helped us get closer to where we are today.

I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice.

I vividly remember the summer of 1964 with its voter registration drives, boiling racial tensions, and the erupting awareness of the cruelty of racism. I was never the same after that summer.

The civil rights movement would experience many important victories, but Rosa Parks will always be remembered as its catalyst.

Selma was the turning point.

I think every high school student who was alert during the early '60s got very embittered by the slow progress and the violence surrounding the Civil Rights Movement.

If you will protest courageously, and yet with dignity and Christian love, when the history books are written in future generations, the historians will have to pause and say, "There lived a great people-a black people-who injected new meaning and dignity into the veins of civilization.

I think that the implication of King's assassination has not been fully appreciated.

The March on Washington was a culmination of years of hard work and dedication of many individuals.

If Rosa Parks had not refused to move to the back of the bus, you and I might never have heard of Dr. Martin Luther King.

I took an interest in the Civil Rights Movement. I listened to Martin Luther King. The Vietnam War was raging. When I was 18, I was eligible for the draft, but when I went to be tested, I didn't qualify.

I marched back then - I was in a civil-rights musical, Fly Blackbird, and we met Martin Luther King.

Rosa Parks will be remembered for her lasting contributions to society. Her legacy lives on in the continued struggle for civil rights around the world. She will be missed.

I had been involved in the March on Washington in 1963. I was with friends carrying a sign, 'Protestants, Jews and Catholics for Civil Rights.'

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.

The legal difference between the sit-ins and the Freedom Riders was significant.

Preachers were leaders in the Civil Rights Movement in the South because they were influenced by their congregations while most other Southerners were under the influence of the Chamber of Commerce. The Clergy were the best able to withstand the white economic pressure that could intimidate and harm most others.

The so called Negro Movement is part of the attempted takeover of our country by the lazy, the indolent, the beatnicks and by some misguided religionists and bleeding hearts.

There never was a moment of American history more honorable or more inspiring than the pilgrimage of clergymen and laymen of every race and faith pouring into Selma to face danger at the side of its embattled Negroes.

I went to the library and found lots of material about this time, about the Freedom March and what was going on down there in 1964.

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.

If it hadn't been for that march across the Edmund Pettus Bridge on Bloody Sunday, there would be no Barack Obama as President of the United States of America.

Rosa Parks is rock and roll.

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a revolutionary, simple and plain.

The Montgomery Bus Boycott began in December 1955, and by 1956 NAACP leaders came to me and asked me to be part of a lawsuit they wanted to file on my behalf and that of three other women, to challenge segregation on public buses.