Thaddeus Stevens Quotes

The other reason that I am here today, again from the State Department and from the court record of the court of appeals, is that when I am abroad I speak out against the injustices against the Negro people of this land.

I cannot escape the conscientious discharge of my duty towards a class of American citizens, whose only crime consists of their color.

The South opposes the civil rights of Negroes and their protection by law. Witness lynchings where no one is punished, witness the Jim Crow laws that deny the letter and spirit of the Constitution. For democracy to have real meaning, the Negro must have the same civil rights as any other American citizen. It seems obvious that the South does not yet know what this war is all about

Southern attempts to deny blacks equal rights were turning the Constitution into a sublime and beautiful scripture—into a horrid charter of wrong.

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.

It never occurred to me that I was not going to challenge segregation.

I maintain that every civil rights bill in this country was passed for white people, not for black people.

We cannot consent to purchase a shameful peace by leaving the coloured population in a position in which they stood before the war with not even the ordinary civil rights which the government of the Cape Colony has long conceded.

In the South in the 1960’s you lived in a state of terrorism if your skin was black.

It did not improve the feeling of the defeated classes of the South to contemplate, at first, the amendments of the Constitution of the United States, which not only established the freedom of the slave, but established his citizenship beyond question, and putting into his hands the ballot, making him the political equal of his former owner. Objecting not only to the law, but to that practice under it, … the former master class became greatly exasperated, and resolving, if possible, to overcome this condition of things, organized bands of "White-liners," "Ku-Klux," and "Bull-dozers," and entered upon that systematic warfare upon Republicans, white and colored, which, resulting in violence, intimidation and murder, has necessitated the use of the army to maintain the peace, and protect the loyal people of the South against that domestic violence, which at times seemed to threaten utter destruction, interfering even with legislatures, and disturbing the operations of the Government.

Please tell the Attorney General that we have been cooling off for 350 years. If we cool off any more, we’ll be in the deep freeze. The Freedom Rides will go on.

Its whole effect is not to confer or regulate rights, but to require that whatever of these enumerated rights and obligations are imposed by State laws shall ... be without distinction based on race.

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.

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.

Black people have been fighting for basic citizenship rights since the inception of the country.

Time begins the healing process of wounds cut deeply by oppression. We soothe ourselves with the salve of attempted indifference, accepting the false pattern set up by the horrible restriction of Jim Crow laws.

I have never been what you would call just an integrationist. I know I've been called that... Integrating that bus wouldn't mean more equality. Even when there was segregation, there was plenty of integration in the South, but it was for the benefit and convenience of the white person, not us.

While the old spiritual 'Slavery Chain Done Broke at Last' was sung by blacks in the hours following the Appomattox surrender, racism sadly continues to be a crippling national scourge.

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.

When I wrote 'The Secret Life of Bees,' I was writing about civil rights.

As a southerner born after the epic events of the civil rights movement, I've always wondered how on earth people of good will could have conceivably lived with Jim Crow - with the daily degradations, the lynchings in plain sight, and, as the movement gathered force, with the fire hoses and the police dogs and the billy clubs.

There has been only a civil rights movement, whose tone of voice was adapted to an audience of liberal whites.

I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956, with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins - I was only 16 years old - we went down to the public library trying to check out some books, and we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors. It was a public library.

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.

Some of the most moving experiences I've had are just in black churches in the South, during the Civil Rights Movement, where people were getting beaten, killed, really struggling for the most elementary rights.