Mike Rogers Quotes

Today is a great day, not only of healing and reconciliation, but also coming together. I'm so glad the whole Little Rock Nine was alive and here to see this.

I say to Governor Wallace, no American can ever be an outsider anywhere in this nation.

It's good that segregation is over.

We are Christian and Jewish and Muslim and Hindu and none of the above. We are gay and straight. We are black, brown, white, and innumerable combinations. We are young and old, female and male, with and without disabilities, urban and rural, and liberal and conservative. Every one of us is an equal American.

As the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court case has shown us, separate is not always equal.

This nation was founded by men of many nations and backgrounds. It was founded on the principle that all men are created equal, and that the rights of every man are diminished when the rights of one man are threatened ... It ought to to be possible, in short, for every American to enjoy the privileges of being American without regard to his race or his color.

I am not in favor of caste, nor separation of the brotherhood of mankind, and would as willingly live among white men as Black, if I had equal possession and enjoyment of privileges, but I shall never be reconciled living among them subservient to their will.

I look forward confidently to the day when all who work for a living will be one with no thought to their separateness as Negroes, Jews, Italians or any other distinctions. This will be the day when we bring into full realization the American dream -- a dream yet unfulfilled.

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit together at the table of brotherhood.

Had it not been for James Meredith, who was willing to risk his life, the University of Mississippi would still be all white.

Let us stop saying 'white Americans' and 'colored Americans,' let us try once and for all saying... Americans. Let human beings be equal on Earth as in Heaven.

The fact that women are very young in obtaining their civil rights and African-Americans are young in obtaining their civil rights, I think it's about time that we extend that to all Americans, whether straight, gay, purple, green, black, brown.

Martin Luther King, Jr. didn't carry just a piece of cloth to symbolize his belief in racial equality; he carried the American flag.

Brown v. Board is the foundation by which all Americans can look for hope - hope for their children, hope for their families, and hope for a better future.

The legal battle against segregation is won, but the community battle goes on.

In this nation, the greatest of all nations, there are no second-class families. That is our great American conviction.

I admired Truman, among many other things, because he integrated the Army. I admired JFK because the very first civil rights legislation was passed at his insistence. JFK showed what you could do, though he was a deeply flawed person, as we all now know.

Americanism is not a matter of skin or color.

While our country has made great strides in breaking down the barriers which for so long denied equal opportunity to all Americans, we are not yet the beautiful symphony of brotherhood of Dr. King's dream.

I want a fair housing bill. We’ve got to end this Goddamn discrimination against Negroes. Until people, whether they’re purple, brown, black, yellow, red, green, or whatever – live together, they’ll never know they have the same hopes for their children, the same fears, troubles, woes, ambitions.

The time to end racial segregation in the South is upon us now.

The complete destruction of all enforced segregation is now in sight.

By the force of our demands, our determination and our numbers, we shall splinter the segregated South into a thousand pieces, and put them back in the image of God and democracy.

Let me say … how deeply grateful all people of good will are to you for your assiduous labor and dauntless courage in seeking to make the Civil Rights Bill a reality.

If we Americans are to survive it will have to be because we choose and elect and defend to be first of all Americans; to present to the world one homogeneous and unbroken front, whether of white Americans or black ones or purple or blue or green.