George C. Wallace Quotes

He didn't even have the satisfaction of being killed for civil rights. it had to be some silly little Communist.

We've talked more about civil rights after the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than we talked about it before 1964.

We could beat back Kennedy on Civil Rights, but Lyndon [Johnson] knows how to beat us.

I knew the Civil Rights Act was right … but I also loved the South and didn't want it used as the whipping boy of the Democratic Party

I grew up in Illinois in an environment where my parents were very politically active in the civil rights movement.

The Civil Rights Movement, it wasn't just a couple of, you know, superstars like Martin Luther King. It was thousands and thousands - millions, I should say - of people taking risks, becoming leaders in their community.

I remember as a boy when the conversation on civil rights was won in the South. I remember a time when one of my friends made a racist joke and another said, 'Hey man, we don't go for that anymore.'

I grew up in Ohio, where civil-rights accomplishments had already begun to accelerate before Martin Luther King appeared. In hindsight, we know that many people, black and white, were instrumental in changing the Jim Crow status quo on all levels.

Historians and scholars have access to every issue of every newspaper and journal written during the civil rights struggle of the 1960s but can access only a comparative handful of papers covering the election of Barack Obama.

I think that the thing that we learned back in the day of the civil rights movement is that you do have to keep on keeping on.

Many well-meaning intelligent people have argued since the May 17, 1954, decision of the United States Supreme Court outlawing segregation in the public schools that communication between the races has broken down.

In the summer of 1964, my sister and I went to South Ballston, Virginia, to stay with my aunt and her kids. They passed the civil rights bill that summer; my cousins were so happy because now they could swim in the pool.

When people discuss the 1960s and the great Civil Rights Era, they often speak in romantic terms as if there wasn't immense work put in, and as if there wasn't immense sacrifice that took place. But none of those battles were easily fought and won; there were sustained movements behind them.

Mrs. Parks' act of brave defiance rocked the foundation of American society and inspired generations of civil rights leaders and created a sense of hope for every American facing legal discrimination in this country.

There's a great book about John Kennedy and his relationship to civil rights called 'The Bystander.' The title alone suggests that he did as little as possible, any minimal critical effort, to really facilitate civil rights in the White House.

Freedom Summer, the massive voter education project in Mississippi, was 1964. I graduated from high school in 1965. So becoming active was almost a rite of passage.

Many civil rights came about, not when they were passed into law, but because the federal government did what it should and saw them enforced.

Electoral politics was always an objective of the Black Panther party, so Barack Obama is a part of what we dreamed and struggled and died for.

The really important victory of the civil rights movement was that it made racism unpopular, whereas a generation ago at the turn of the last century, you had to embrace racism to get elected to anything.

Well of course there's been a great deal of progress over the last 40 years. We don't have laws that segregate black people within the society any longer.

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

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

Obama's not down for the civil rights struggle, and he certainly wasn't down for the apartheid struggle, but he's clearly gonna take advantage of it and insert himself in such a way as to make it look like he is single-handedly responsible for apartheid going by the wayside.

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

It was clear to me as a civil rights leader in the '60s that unless we put the social and economic underpinnings beneath the political and the civil rights, we wouldn't go anywhere.