John Carlos Quotes

Black power can be clearly defined for those who do not attach the fears of white America to their questions about it.

I'm old enough to have lived through a time when Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, Viola Liuzzo, Andrew Goodman, Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and others died so people of color could vote.

When I got cleared by doctors and was coronavirus-free, one of the first things I did was get to marching in Boston. I wanted to join the people out there doing all they could to speak out against injustice and hatred and police brutality - folks looking to ensure the future of our country is better than its past.

Rosa Parks showed us all that one little person can make a whole bunch of noise without so much as a whisper. She showed the world that the color of your skin shouldn't determine what part of the bus you sit in... as you ride through life.

I came back to Louisville after the Olympics with my shiny gold medal. Went into a luncheonette where black folks couldn't eat. Thought I'd put them on the spot. I sat down and asked for a meal. The Olympic champion wearing his gold medal. They said, "We don't serve niggers here." I said, "That's okay, I don't eat 'em." But they put me out in the street. So I went down to the river, the Ohio River, and threw my gold medal in it.

You know, my friends, there comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression.

The world knows of Rosa Parks because of a single, simple act of dignity and courage that struck a lethal blow to the foundations of legal bigotry.

They told us we wouldn’t get here. And there were those who said that we would get here only over their dead bodies, but all the world today knows that we are here and that we are standing before the forces of power in the state of Alabama saying, ‘We ain’t going to let nobody turn us around.’

Since being in India, I am more convinced than ever before that the method of nonviolent resistance is the most potent weapon available to oppressed people in their struggle for justice and human dignity.

There's no problem on the planet that can't be solved without violence. That's the lesson of the civil rights movement.

Bobby Darin was one of the first to take black musicians on the road with his band, and there were places that didn't want him to play, and he stood up to it.

Where I come from, if you see your family and friends' civil rights being taken away, you speak up and do everything you can to keep that from happening!

In the time when my mother began standing up against prejudice and racism, the vast majority of white Americans rarely thought about civil rights.

Even after facing jail, Martin Luther King, Jr. courageously and boldly spoke out against racial inequality.

You want to shut up every Negro who has the courage to stand up and fight for the rights of his people, for the rights of workers, and I have been on many a picket line for the steelworkers too.

Unlike earlier black-power movements that tried to fight or segregate for self-preservation, Black Lives Matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning, and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us.

The civil rights movement was based on faith. Many of us who were participants in this movement saw our involvement as an extension of our faith. We saw ourselves doing the work of the Almighty. Segregation and racial discrimination were not in keeping with our faith, so we had to do something.

In the women's movement, women needed men to stand up and say, 'This isn't right.' In the civil rights of the '60s, it took people of all color to demand equal rights.

I'm a child of the Civil Rights Movement.

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

Even here in America, people are fighting for civil rights 45 years after the civil rights movement.

The least I can do is show Medgar I still care. And Martin.

If they had not murdered Malcolm X, there probably never would have been a Black Panther Party.

We have been saying "Freedom" for six years. What we are going to start saying now is "Black Power". We have begged the President. We've begged the federal government. That's all we've been doing, begging and begging. From now on, when they ask you what you want, you know what to tell them.

Freedom is never granted; it is won. Justice is never given; it is exacted.