Charles Bradley Quotes

The first African-American leader was Dr. Martin Luther King.

I don't remember when I didn't know about Martin Luther King.

The goal of Dr. Martin Luther King is to give Negroes a chance to sit in a segregated restaurant beside the same white man who had brutalized them for 400 years.

I was so inspired by Dr. King that in 1956, with some of my brothers and sisters and first cousins - I was only 16 years old - we went down to the public library trying to check out some books, and we were told by the librarian that the library was for whites only and not for colors. It was a public library.

I marched back then - I was in a civil-rights musical, Fly Blackbird, and we met Martin Luther King.

When I was 15 years old in 1955, I heard of Rosa Parks. I heard the words of Martin Luther King, Jr. on our radio.

I have a lot of respect for Martin Luther King. I think he was one of the greatest orators that the country ever produced.

There were three Selma-to-Montgomery marches in March 1965, and Rosa Parks had missed the first one. Parks, whose act of civil disobedience sparked the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955, moved to Detroit two years later for safety reasons.

Dr. King's general principles are universal. But the things he confronted took place in another era.

I think, along with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks will go down as one of the two most well-known and remembered figures out of the Civil Rights Movement.

I was born after the Civil Rights Movement. I never saw Martin Luther King alive.

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.

Jim Crow was king... and I heard a game in which Jackie Robinson was playing, and I felt pride in being alive.

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.

The time to end racial segregation in the South is upon us now.

The South opposes the civil rights of Negroes and their protection by law. Witness lynchings where no one is punished, witness the Jim Crow laws that deny the letter and spirit of the Constitution. For democracy to have real meaning, the Negro must have the same civil rights as any other American citizen. It seems obvious that the South does not yet know what this war is all about

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

Martin Luther King, Jr. was a revolutionary, simple and plain.

I couldn't see why a black man wasn't allowed to drink out of the same water fountain or sit in the same bus or go to the same schools as a white guy.

Martin Luther King fought for blacks, and democratic whites were with him.

When I was in high school if you were black and lived in Detroit, and you wanted to drive down to Florida to go on vacation, you had to plan to drive all the way through, because you couldn't stop in a hotel all the way through South Carolina, North Carolina, and Georgia. We can't even fathom such a thing now, can we?

The Circle Theatre, black people had to sit in the balcony. Any theater with a balcony, black people had to sit up there. Black people couldn't check into any hotel except their own. And black people couldn't eat anywhere except in their own restaurants.

I want to play Martin Luther King. That is absolutely a role and a character who is important to the landscape of the world that I really want to play.