Langston Hughes Quotes

We've had a great change. Dr King saw to that. I was so grateful to see the 'colored only' signs come off the water fountains and bathrooms in the south. But the struggle lives on.

It is our experience that the nation doesn't move around questions of genuine equality for the poor and for black people until it is confronted massively, dramatically in terms of direct action.

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.

When you say you want to talk about racial justice, that's not the same as I want to do something about racial justice. Saying I want to hold police accountable is doing something. Saying that I want to take money out of politics, big money, is doing something.

When I was 15 years old and in the tenth grade, I heard of Martin Luther King, Jr. Three years later, when I was 18, I met Dr. King and we became friends. Two years after that I became very involved in the civil rights movement. I was in college at that time. As I got more and more involved, I saw politics as a means of bringing about change.

If Martin Luther King came back, he'd say we need another civil rights movement built on class not race.

What drew me to both study and activism was the formative experience of the civil rights movement.

Martin Luther King told American Blacks not to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

The New Deal ultimately undermined Jim Crow’s prospects. The very legislation embraced by Southern segregationists created at first mere chinks, then whole openings for social change that were grasped by an incipient, soon powerful, movement for equal rights for Blacks.

In 2016, the conversation of the black experience is so broad, and it's very raw. I mean, c'mon, we have a black president. That's a major thing, and there are so many other significant occurrences that have come from the '60s and '70s up to now.

I want some help on this. I'm being very honest, i want some ideas, as somebody who was arrested 50 years ago fighting for Civil Rights trying to desegregate schools in Chicago, who spent his whole life fighting against racism, I want your ideas. What do you think we can do? What can we do?

If I wanted to fight to make a better world racially, I wouldn't be in the music business. You dig, if I were going to be a freedom fighter music is the wrong field.

LISTEN: If you ever wondered what you would do if you were alive in the Civil Rights Movement, NOW IS THE TIME to find out. NOW. RIGHT NOW.

It is our hope that when people read "March" - Book One, Book Two, and Book Three - that they will understand that another generation of people, especially young people, were deeply inspired by the work of Rosa Parks, Martin Luther King Jr. and many others.

A little old lady sitting at the front of the bus can do nothing to change civil rights.

These people in Mississippi State, they are not "down"; all they need is a chance. And I am determined to give my part not for what the Movement can do for me, but what I can do for the Movement to bring about a change in the State of Mississippi.

My father and I marched with Martin Luther King Jr. through the streets of Detroit.

If the Negro is to achieve the goal of integration, he must organize himself into a militant and nonviolent mass movement.

That's where Dr. [Martin Luther] King is mixed up. His goals should be the solution of the problem of the black man in America.

Martin Luther King has made the Negro in America unnatural.

I think that America could not become America until it dealt with the disenfranchisement of women and African Americans in the last century. It had to. America could not become America until it dealt with that. And did it deal with it perfectly? No. But it had to confront it.

Has he paid his dues? Is he black enough? John Lewis and I were out there marching and organizing sit-ins back in the '60s so that his children and my children would not have to do it. We would have been failures if had to do the same things we did.

But something stirred across the country because of what happened in Selma, Alabama, because some folks were willing to march across a bridge. And so they [my parents] got together, Barack Obama Jr. was born. So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama. Don't tell me I'm not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama.

Well Lord, I'm still on the case. I'm still doing what Dr. King and Pops want me to do. I'm still on that freedom highway, and I'm going to walk on it until Dr. King's dream is realized.

The goal is to talk about the issues that are happening in the USA with the ultimate goal of making change. Not just some rebellious act that we're trying to have against our country.