Cicely Tyson Quotes

I want to see young people in America feel the spirit of the 1960s and find a way to get in the way. To find a way to get in trouble. Good trouble, necessary trouble.

My friends were dropping like flies, and the government wasn't doing anything. You don't watch an entire generation take water hoses and dogs on the front line during the '60s or watch another generation perish from AIDS and then get to drive around in big cars and do nothing.

Boycotts have been a critical part of social justice in American history, particularly for African-Americans.

Young people, throughout history, have always been the lifeblood of every movement for civil and human rights.

Young people have been at the forefront of every great social movement in our country's history.

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.

Look at the Civil Rights Movement. Look at any kind of fight for change. People had to keep fighting and taking their rights. Rights are never given to you. They have to be fought for and they have to be taken.

I would argue that we have a generation of young people, particularly minorities, who are no longer putting up with the kinds of things their parents put up with. They're much more self-confident. It's no longer acceptable to make fun of people because of race or sex. But it has always been present in American society.

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.

My earliest memories are of the civil rights era. My earliest experiences were rage.

For a black student to work in southwest Mississippi for example - or in the Delta in 1960, 1961, 1962 - was high-risk work.

Mr. President, the Black masses are restless and we are going to march on Washington.

I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.

I’ve never been involved in a Civil Rights campaign that was not ill-timed

We will have demonstrations until the injustices that have caused them are eliminated.

He apologizes for injustice …. Belittles the emasculating effects of caste distinctions…. He should be unceasingly and firmly opposed.

I must admit that this is a deliberate attempt to dramatize conditions in this city and state. We’re going to turn Selma upside down and inside out in order to make it right side up.

I'm not quite sure precisely when social and political activism became a visible brand of my DNA, but it seems to me that I was born into it. It is hard to be born into the experience in the world of poverty and not develop some instinct for survival and resistance to those things that oppress you.

The action of Rosa Parks, the words and leadership of Dr. King inspired me. I was deeply inspired. I wanted to do something.

Chicago, I feel, is a microcosm for the segregated, violent environment that is America. I try to not only speak about these things in music, but also try to address these things in real life tangibly with action.

This is how a revolution begins. It begins when someone grows tired of standing idly by, waiting for history's arc to bend toward justice, and instead decides to give it a swift shove. It begins when a black seamstress named Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat on a bus to a white man in the segregated South.

Young people think Rosa Parks just sat down on a bus and ended segregation, but that wasn't the case at all.

There's a lot of injustice in the world and it's what I sing about in my music and what I try to confront in my life as an activist.

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.