John Lewis Quotes

Blacks have no rights - in fact they were three - fifths human according to the constitution to give slave owners more voting rights. So that's African Americans.

To pass this law and then hope that South Carolina … would do justice to the negro is absurd. She has 291,000 whites and 412,000 blacks. To pass such a law would be for the governing power to divest itself of the government and hand it over to a subject and despised caste ... The same is true, more or less, of all the South

The suggestion that Negroes should be treated as equals to white men woke some of the deepest and ugliest fears in the American mind

Lyndon Johnson used to call his chauffer “Boy,” but he passed the greatest Civil Rights bill in the history of the company.

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

In my home county—Lowndes County, Alabama--in 1964 Blacks were 80 percent of the population. Not one Black was registered to vote—Not one!!!

I don’t see how President Johnson can send troops to Vietnam …, and he can’t send troops to Selma Alabama.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was vigorously and vociferously opposed by the Southern states. President Lyndon B. Johnson signed it into law nonetheless.

I have seen periods of progress followed by reaction. I have seen the hopes and aspirations of Negroes rise during World War II, only to be smashed during the Eisenhower years. I am seeing the victories of the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations destroyed by Richard Nixon.

Countless black citizens in the South couldn't vote. They were second-class citizens from cradle to grave. The discrimination was terrible, brutal.

It was to carry the American democratic journey beyond these failings that Black citizens and civil rights workers risked unemployment, violence and death.

I drank from colored water fountains and from the white water fountain just to see what it was like when I was a kid. What shocks me is that these kids today don't realize that this happened in many of our lifetimes.

Washington, D.C. in 1942 was not the easiest place in the world for a Negro to get along.

I don't think the riots derailed the civil rights movement.

I'd like to think I would have signed the Civil Rights bill and wouldn't have had any issues with it.

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.

In the combat between the emerging Negroes of the South and the ruling white trash, I sympathize greatly with the Negro.

Negroes could not vote in those days. When I went to Massachusetts and ran for office, it was the first time in my life that I ever voted.

Essentially, Eisenhower passed on to his successors the problem of guaranteeing constitutional rights to Negro citizens.

President Bush blames the LA riots on the 60's. Which 60's is he talking about the 1960s or the 1860s when Lincoln freed the slaves?

Why can a Communist eat at a lunch counter in Selma, Alabama while a Black American veteran cannot?

It is bad enough that North Carolina should have the only nigger Congressman. It is sufficiently humiliating to the white people of the Second district; a sad enough commentary upon the political conditions that have obtained in this State

All the people of the South are in favor of segregation. And Supreme Court or no Supreme Court, we are going to maintain segregated schools.

Once the clutch of Jim Crow had loosened, opponents of civil rights shifted the “locus of attack” by injecting crime onto the agenda …. Fusing anxiety about crime to anxiety over racial change and riots, civil rights and racial disorder—initially defined as a problem of minority disenfranchisement—were defined as a crime problem, which helped shift debate from social reform to punishment.

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.