Joe Morton Quotes

Dick Gregory was a great comedian who went and got arrested, did hunger strikes, protests. It never hurt his career to be outspoken.

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

My grandfather James Peck was a civil rights activist.

My father acted as the Illinois Branch president of the NAACP and so we spent a lot of time in the marches and the rallies working on behalf of people of color.

There's a very fine line between political comedian and activist, and I don't really think I fall over into the activist category.

Rosa Parks' entire career has been one as working as a civil rights activist.

My mother saw nothing inconsistent in her traditional desire to look after her husband and children and her radical politics. She began her civil rights work before most people had ever heard the word 'feminism,' and in those early years, she was focused on racial justice.

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.

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is one of my personal heroes.

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

My father has a pragmatic mind. He marched with Dr. King in the '60s, and he's very much for women's rights.

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.

I'm a child of the Civil Rights Movement.

The civil rights movement wasn't easy for anybody.

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

I think Mr. Cosby has always been very much an activist and a big proponent of African-American pride. That's how 'The Cosby Show' came about. I think in his older years, he has gotten a lot more direct and vocal about it. But I think he only wants the best for all of us.

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

The greatest movement for social justice our country has ever known is the civil rights movement and it was totally rooted in a love ethic.

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

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.

Martin Luther King told American Blacks not to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism.

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.

When I first saw Dick Gregory on television, growing up in Queens, it was startling and amazing, because nobody else was doing what he was doing.

We come to Selma to be renewed. We come to be inspired. We come to be reminded that we must do the work that justice and equality calls us to do.

I remember back in the 1960s - late '50s, really - reading a comic book called 'Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery Story.' Fourteen pages. It sold for 10 cents. And this little book inspired me to attend non-violence workshops, to study about Gandhi, about Thoreau, to study Martin Luther King, Jr., to study civil disobedience.